IMAGE INSPECTION METHOD AND IMAGE INSPECTION DEVICE

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an image inspection method that detects a cause of abnormality occurrence of an inspected object due to a Mahalanobis distance.SOLUTION: An image inspection method comprises: a step of acquiring an image group composed of a plurality of abnormal article images for each abnormal mode; a step of calculating a reference Mahalanobis distance for the image group from a Mahalanobis distance based on an amount of a characteristic of each abnormal article image of the image group as to each image group; a step S21 of calculating the Mahalanobis distance from an amount of a characteristic of an inspection object image of an inspection object; a step S28 of determining an abnormal mode to which the inspection object determined as an abnormal article belongs on the basis of the Mahalanobis distance of the inspection object image and the reference Mahalanobis distance corresponding to each image group; a step S30 of calculating an occurrence cycle of an abnormal part from photo-shooting time information as to a plurality of inspection object images belonging to the same abnormal mode; and a step S34 of acquiring an occurrence cause corresponding to the occurrence cycle calculated from a storage section preliminarily storing the occurrence cycle of the abnormal part for each abnormal mode in association with the occurrence cause.