One of the challenging tasks in visual inspection using CCD camera is to identify surface defects in an image with complex textured backgeound. In microscopic view, the surface of real objects shows regular or random textured patterns. In this paper, we present a visual inspection algorithm to extract abnormal surface defects in an image with textured background. The algorithm uses the space and frequency information at the same time by introducing the Dominant Frequency Map(DFM) which can describe the frequency characteristics of every small local region of an input image. We demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the method through a series of real experiments for a 14" TV CRT mold. The method successfully identifies a variety of infinitesimal defects, whose size is larger than $50mu extrm{m}$, of the mold. The experimental results show that the DFM based method is less sensitive to the environmental changes, such as illumination and defocusing, than conventional vision techniques.ques.