Abstract: To detect the defects on the pipe surface accurately and timely, a visual inspection method for pipe surface defect based on feature point was proposed. An image sample set was constructed by collecting the surface defect images of typical pipe, and the influence of interference background on defect detection was reduced by specifying the region of interest of the image. The defect detection method based on ORB (oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF)feature point was used to detect the point defect in the image, and the FAST operator was used to search the feature point of the defect image, the detected feature points were set as the center of the circle, and the feature point descriptor was constructed with the connecting line between the center of the circle and the centroid of the point taking area as the abscissa. Typical pipe defect images were selected to verify the proposed method. The results show that the designed detection method has high detection accuracy, fast detection speed, high engineering practical value, and can provide a pre-research basis for automatic detection of pipe surface defects.