Steel bearing balls are important component in machines having moving parts. In this paper we describe a vision-based automatic inspection system designed for sensing defects on the surface of steel bearing balls. The system has a camera looking down over a rail on which balls roll. Two mirrors are installed at both sides of the rail so that the side parts of a ball can be well inspected. The entire ball surface can be sufficiently seen by taking three images at $120^{circ}$ rotation interval. Defects are detected by thresholding the difference image between an image captured and the reference image of a good ball.