Various intelligent systems show a rapidly growing potential use of visual information processing technologies. This paper presents an example of employing visual information processing technologies for detecting and measuring rings in banknote images. The size of the rings is one of parameters used to inspect the banknote printing quality. The approach developed consists of two phases. In the first phase, based on histogram processing and data clustering, image areas containing rings are localized and edges of the rings are detected. Then, in the second phase, applying the hard and possibilistic spherical shell clustering to the extracted edge pixels the ring centre and radii are estimated. The experimental investigations performed have shown that even highly occluded rings are robustly detected. Several prototypes of the system developed have been installed in two banknote printing shops in Europe. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.