In the production of industrial fabric, it needs automatic real-time system to detect defects on the fabric for assuring the defect-free products flow to the market. At present, many visual-based methods are designed for detecting the fabric defects, but they usually lead to high false alarm. Base on this reason, we propose a Sobel operator combined with patch statistics (SOPS) algorithm for defects detection. First, we describe the defect detection model. mean filter is applied to preprocess the acquired image. Then, Sobel operator (SO) is applied to deal with the defect image, and we can get a coarse binary image. Finally, the binary image can be divided into many patches. For a given patch, a threshold is used to decide whether the patch is defect-free or not. Finally, a new image will be reconstructed, and we did a loop for the reconstructed image to suppress defects noise. Experiments show that the proposed SOPS algorithm is effective.