The split and the hole are two common defects on sugi,Cryptomeria japonica.They have a common feature in that they are associated with surface irregularities.A laser scanning system to detect the splits and the holes based on their thickness was developed,which correlated spatially with the profile information.The displacements measured by the laser sensor were converted to pixel values to generate the displacement profile image.Both the splits and the holes manifested well in the image.A dedicated image-processing program written in Visual Basic was developed.The defects regions were accurately located by the image processing.To identify the defects,eight recognition rules based on four features were utilized.Furthermore,a method based on the pixel model was proposed to compute the area of the defect.The results indicated that the defects could be identified correctly,and the areas could be computed accurately using the pixels model.