Abstract: During the past decade, computer vision methods for inline inspection became an important tool in a lot of industrial processes. During the same time polarization imaging techniques rapidly evolved with the development of electro-optic components, as e.g. the polarization cameras, now available on the market. This paper is dedicated to the application of polarization techniques for visually inspecting complex metallic surfaces. As we will shortly recall, this consists of a direct image interpretation based on the measurement of the polarization parameters of the light reflected by the inspected object. The proposed image interpretation procedure consists of a Gabor pre-filtering and a Haralick feature detector. It is demonstrated that polarization images permit to reach higher classification rates than in case of a direct interpretation of images without polarization information.