One area in which composites have been used rather extensively is for fabricating pressure vessel. These structures can be readily manufactured by filament winding, which is, as far as composite fabrication techniques are concerned, a relatively inexpensive method for producing composite structures. Unfortunately, the higher strength material and fabrication costs are not the only disadvantages of fiber-reinforced polymer composites when they are compared to metals. Additionally, these materials tend to exhibit brittle behavior. This is of particular concern when they are subjected to a low-velocity impact during routine handling a significant amount of structural damage can be introduced into the composites. The goals of this paper are to understand the impact damage behavior and identify the effect of surface coating materials on impact resistance in filament wound composite pressure vessels. For these, a series of low velocity impact tests was performed on specimens cutting from the full scale pressure vessel by the instrumented impact testing machine. The specimens are classified into two types with and without surface protective material. The visualization for impact damage is made by metallurgical microscope. Based on the impact force history and damage, the resistance parameters were employed and its validity in identifying the damage resistance of pressure vessel was reviewed. As the results, the impact resistance of the filament wound composites and its dependency on the protective material were evaluated quantitatively.