Appearance inspection apparatus and appearance inspection method

An appearance inspection apparatus comprising:

• a lighting unit having a plurality of light sources emitting single-wavelength light with relative spectral distributions different from one another, the lighting unit substantially simultaneously irradiating a photographic subject with illumination light emitted by the plurality of light sources;
• an imaging unit capturing light discharged by the photographic subject in response to the illumination light irradiated by the plurality of light sources;
• a memory storing information about sensitivity characteristics of the imaging unit for each color;
• an operating unit separating an image captured by the imaging unit into a plurality of single-wavelength images including a first image, a second image, and a third image, for each component of the single-wavelength light, using the information about the sensitivity characteristics of the imaging unit for each color;
• a detecting unit detecting information about a specific area of the photographic subject using the first image and the second image chosen from the plurality of single-wavelength images;
• and
• a determination unit extracting an amount of image characteristics corresponding to a characteristic part present in the specific area detected by the detecting unit using the first image and the third image chosen from the plurality of single-wavelength images.