The goals of the paper are to understand the impact damage behavior and identify the effect of surface protective 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, which are with and without surface protective material. The visualization for impact damage by two different impactors is made by metallurgical microscope. Based on the impact force history and damage, the impact resistance parameters were employed,rod its validity in identifying the damage resistance of filament wound composite pressure vessel was reviewed. As the results, the impact resistance of the filament wound composites and its dependency on the surface protective material were evaluated quantitatively