An intelligent camera for surface defect inspection is presented which can pre-process the surface image of a rolled strip and pick defective areas out at a spead of 1600 meters per minute. The camera is made up of a high speed line CCD, a 60Mb/s CCD digitizer with correlated double sampling function, and a field programmable gate array(FPGA), which can quickly distinguish defective areas using a perceptron embedded in FPGA thus the data to be further processed would dramatically be reduced. Some experiments show that the camera can meet high producing speed, and reduce cost and complexity of automation surface inspection systems.