According to the characters and requirements of the nondestructive steel radial tire detection, an X-ray inspection and defect recognition system for all-steel radial tire is designed. The sector X-ray and linear CMOS camera are used to capture the non-blind area and full field radial tire x-ray digital image, and the lateral resolution of the image is 0.08 mm. Based on the character of the radial tire, the defect recognition algorithms are designed to segment and detect the inner defect of the radial tire automatically in the meantime of recording. Experimental results show that the defects of the tire with dimension ranges from 23 to 35 inch, such as bended Cord, crossed cord, wide spacing cord, broken cord, belt defects, impurity defects and so on, can be recognized on-line by the system.