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Purpose This paper aims to design an automatic inspection system for the characters on tire molds, which involves a vision-based inspection method for the characters on tire molds. Design/methodology/approach An automatic inspection equipment is designed according to the features of the tire mold. To implement the inspection task, the corresponding image processing methods are designed, including image preprocessing, image mosaic, image locating and character inspection. Image preprocessing mainly contains fitting the contours of the acquired tire mold images and those of the computer aided design (CAD) as the arcs of two circles and polar transformation of the acquired images and the CAD. Then, the authors propose a novel framework to locate the acquired images into the corresponding mosaicked tire mold image. Finally, a character inspection scheme is proposed by combining an support-vector-machine-based character recognition method and a string matching approach. At the stages of image locating and character inspection, image mosaic is simultaneously used to label the defects in the mosaicked tire mold image, which is based on histograms-of-gradients features. Findings The experimental results indicate that the designed automatic inspection system can inspect the characters on the tire mold with a high accuracy at a reasonable time consumption. Practical implications The designed automatic inspection system can detect the carving faults for the characters on the tire molds, which are the cases that the characters are wrongly added, deleted or modified on the tire mold. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first automatic vision-based inspection system for the characters on tire molds. An inspection equipment is designed and many novel image processing methods are proposed to implement the inspection task. The designed system can be widely applied in the industry.