In this study, a defect detection approach for lithium battery electrode coating is proposed, which employs an imaging approach with multiple line-array cameras and double light source stroboscopic illumination, and distributed parallel image processing techniques. Especially, bright and dark light sources are employed for stroboscopic illumination in this approach, and two high-speed line scan cameras take the bright and dark field images alternately at the same position, which enhances not only the resolution for defect detection but also the detection efficiency. The master-slave distributed processing architecture is used in the image processing stage. Two industrial control computers process the image data coming from each camera in parallel, and the defect data obtained are sent to the host computer via TCP/IP for data fusion and defect classification. The experimental findings demonstrate that the lithium battery electrode coating detection system using this approach can achieve online detection and has a high practical value.