Abstract: In order to accurately detect the defective tailed capsules and measure the tail's height, a method based on multiple-angle contour projection of sphere was proposed. First, capture images of a single cigarette capsule at 10 different angles by a self-rotating mechanism coupled with a high speed camera. Next, extract the contour of the capsule in each image by a contour extraction algorithm. Then expand the contour by the contoured circular projection method and identify any protuberance from the contour corresponding to each angle and calculate its height. Finally, identify the tail defect, if any, on the capsule surface based on the contour information gathered from the 10 images of the capsule. The proposed method was tested with 200 qualified capsule samples and 200 selected tailed-capsule samples, the results showed that the recognition rate of the proposed method was ≥ 95% and the false positive rate was < 1%; the minimum recognizable tail height was 0.05 mm. Release inspection was conducted with capsules of 10 selected batches (roughly 10 thousand capsules per batch), the results indicated that the deviation between the proposed method and manual inspection ranged from -0.08% to 0.21%, which met the requirements of sampling inspection for cigarette capsules. This method provides a technical support for the quality control in cigarette capsule production.