Defective products are unavoidable in printed circuit board production process, so rapid detection and identificationmethods are badly in need of. PCB surface defect detection including a series of processing such as surface imagecapture, mixed noise filtering,images registering and so on, so it takes a lot of CPU time. To improve detection speed, based on GPU parallel computing platform, we designed a reasonable parallel processing system for PCB defect detectionto meet the need of real-time requirements of a production line. Experimental results show that parallel image processing algorithms based on GPU can achieve good results compared to the CPU-based serial algorithm (with speed up ratio up to8.34 in this paper),providing a new approachfor rapid detection of PCB surface defect.