A solder paste brick inspection and physical quality scoring system 10 employs a neural network 70 trained with a fuzzified output vector. An image of solder paste bricks 64 on a printed circuit board 12 is acquired by a CCD camera 30. Values of a predetermined set of brick metrics are extracted from the image by a computer 28 and used as a crisp input vector to trained neural network 70. A defuzzifier 76 converts a fuzzy output vector from neural network 70 into a crisp quality score output which can be used for monitoring and process control.