Abstract: A method for the automatic detection of surface defects for continuously cast products (2) with continuous mechanical removal of the material, which products are separated into part lengths while still in the hot state and are introduced before the final rolling in a rolling train to a material removing machine (1), in particular to a grinding machine, in which the material of the continuously cast product (2) is removed as a function of the defective areas determined by a defect localising equipment (6; 7) more or less intensively from the surface(s) to be machined, which method provides that the surface defect (12a, 12b) is introduced by the defect localising equipment (6; 7) as pictorial information to a picture processing processor (11) and read in by a computer (13), comprising an integrated comparison and evaluation module (15) and connected superposed to the machine control (17), in which computer the transmitted digital pictorial information is compared in a sample recognition process with stored pict