A high speed, low cost, apparatus and method of identification, examination of objects and quality control of manufactured parts and sheet materials, the apparatus including a comparator having memory storage of data representative of the surface of a first "standard" spatial linear distribution of light and memory storage of data representative of another portion of the surface, and including an algorithm for comparing data of the standard with data representative of the second spatial linear distribution of light reflected from a surface to determine if there is a correlation between the two spatial distributions.