The Bead inspection tool is for inspecting material that is applied as a continuous sinuous bead, such as adhesives and sealants, or the channel where the bead will be applied. The tool identifies discrepancies in length, placement, and width, as well as discontinuities. The Bead inspection tool works by accepting a user-defined coarse path as a list of points on a reference bead and then automatically and optimally placing search boxes to form a template. The size and spacing of these search boxes can be modified to change the sampling resolution. The allowable bead width, offset, gap, and overall acceptance measure can be adjusted to meet specific inspection criteria.