In this paper a real-time surface inspection method based on texture features is introduced. The proposed approach is based on the Local Binary Pattern (LBP) texture operator and the Self-Organizing Map (SOM). A very fast software implementation of the LBP operator is presented. The SOM is used as a powerful classifier and visualizer. The efficiency of the method is empirically evaluated in two different problems including textures from the Outex database and from a paper inspection problem.