This paper proposed a patterned fabric defect detection method for sixteen out of seventeen wallpaper groups using a motif-based approach. From the symmetry properties of motifs, the energy of moving subtraction and its variance among motifs are mapped onto an energy-variance space. By learning the distribution of defect-free and defective patterns in this space, boundaries conditions can be determined for defect detection purpose. The proposed method is evaluated on four wallpaper categories, from which all 16 wallpaper groups can be generalized. Altogether, 160 defect-free lattices samples are used for learning the decision boundaries; and 200 other defect-free and 138 other defective samples are used for testing. An overall detection accuracy has reached 93.61%, which outperforms previous approaches.