The pressed protuberant character is a reflectorized character on the difference of reflectance.The image quality of the protuberant character is lower than that of the general character on the chromatic difference of background and foreground.So,the general character quality inspectiing method based on the binary-scale is unfit for the protuberant character.To solve this problem,a new method for direct gray-scale feature extraction based on the ring projection algorithm and the vector sum for inspecting the quality of the pressed character is presented.The new method keeps integrity feature information of the protuberant character and can overcome the main shortages of the traditional method on binary-scale image,such as binarization algorithm,the lower performance of anti-jamming.The experimental results show that the proposed method adapts to detecting the variant gray-scale,location and orientation of the character,and can yield an excellent performance under the conditions of noise and deformity.