To provide an automatic appearance inspection device and a method reducing the capacity of comparison inspection data in an automatic appearance inspection device.

The analog image data of an object to be inspected are fetched by an image data inputting part 1, and the analog image data fetched by the image data inputting part are threshold processed by a thresholding part 2. Then, the binary image data successively fetched from the thresholding part are compared with the parts template of the featured point of a preliminarily prepared pattern so that the featured point of the pattern can be extracted by a pattern feature detecting part 3, and the featured point of non-defective pattern data stored in a pattern feature data storing part 6 is compared with the featured point extracted by the pattern feature detecting part by a feature comparison processing part 4, and the mismatching of the featured points compared by the feature comparison processing part is judged and displayed by a validity/invalidity judging part 5.