A method for controlling the quality of an industrial process, of the type that comprises the steps of: providing one or more reference signals for the industrial process; acquiring one or more real signals that are indicative of the quality of said industrial process; and comparing said one or more reference signals with said one or more real signals in order to identify defects in said industrial process. According to the invention, the method moreover comprises the operations of: obtaining a transformed signal from said reference signal; obtaining a transformed signal from said real signal; and calculating energies of said transformed reference signal and said real signal, respectively, said comparison operation comprising: comparing with one another said energies of said transformed reference signal and said transformed real signal, respectively, in order to extract corresponding time-frequency distributions for selected frequency values; calculating energies of said time-frequency distributions; and comparing the energies of said time-frequency distributions with threshold values in order to identify energy values associated to defects.