The dark-field laser scattering system has been developed to inspect surface defects in infrared cut-off filters and then laser scattering characteristics against the defects are investigated. The qualitative analysis for the reliable and accurate detection performance is described through the correlation between incident angles of a laser and viewing ones of a camera. In this paper, reliable and important information with laser scattering is given for the surface defect inspection of IR filters. Its performance has been verified through various experiments.