1. A method for automated inspection of an object comprising: imaging an object to generate a run-time image; determining the affine pose of the run-time image with respect to an alignment model image; prefiltering the run-time image to generate a filtered image; transforming the filtered image with the affine pose to generate a transformed image; mean-correcting the transformed image with a template image to provide a mean-corrected image; comparing the mean-corrected image with a threshold image to produce an error image; and analyzing the error image to determine object status.