Produce Once, Utilize Twice for Anomaly Detection

Visual anomaly detection aims at classifying and locating the regions that deviate from the normal appearance. Embedding-based methods and reconstruction-based methods are two main approaches for this task. However, they are either not efficient or not precise enough for the industrial detection. To deal with this problem, we derive POUTA (Produce Once Utilize Twice for Anomaly detection), which improves both the accuracy and efficiency by reusing the discriminant information potential in the reconstructive network. We observe that the encoder and decoder representations of the reconstructive network are able to stand for the features of the original and reconstructed image respectively. And the discrepancies between the symmetric reconstructive representations provides roughly accurate anomaly information. To refine this information, a coarse-to-fine process is proposed in POUTA, which calibrates the semantics of each discriminative layer by the high-level representations and supervision loss. Equipped with the above modules, POUTA is endowed with the ability to provide a more precise anomaly location than the prior arts. Besides, the representation reusage also enables to exclude the feature extraction process in the discriminative network, which reduces the parameters and improves the efficiency. Extensive experiments show that, POUTA is superior or comparable to the prior methods with even less cost. Furthermore, POUTA also achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art few-shot anomaly detection methods without any special design, showing that POUTA has strong ability to learn representations inherent in the training data.

Investigating Shift Equivalence of Convolutional Neural Networks in Industrial Defect Segmentation

In industrial defect segmentation tasks, while pixel accuracy and Intersection over Union (IoU) are commonly employed metrics to assess segmentation performance, the output consistency (also referred to equivalence) of the model is often overlooked. Even a small shift in the input image can yield significant fluctuations in the segmentation results. Existing methodologies primarily focus on data augmentation or anti-aliasing to enhance the network's robustness against translational transformations, but their shift equivalence performs poorly on the test set or is susceptible to nonlinear activation functions. Additionally, the variations in boundaries resulting from the translation of input images are consistently disregarded, thus imposing further limitations on the shift equivalence. In response to this particular challenge, a novel pair of down/upsampling layers called component attention polyphase sampling (CAPS) is proposed as a replacement for the conventional sampling layers in CNNs. To mitigate the effect of image boundary variations on the equivalence, an adaptive windowing module is designed in CAPS to adaptively filter out the border pixels of the image. Furthermore, a component attention module is proposed to fuse all downsampled features to improve the segmentation performance. The experimental results on the micro surface defect (MSD) dataset and four real-world industrial defect datasets demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits higher equivalence and segmentation performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods.Our code will be available at https://github.com/xiaozhen228/CAPS.

Exploring the Optimization Objective of One-Class Classification for Anomaly Detection

One-class classification (OCC) is a longstanding method for anomaly detection. With the powerful representation capability of the pre-trained backbone, OCC methods have witnessed significant performance improvements. Typically, most of these OCC methods employ transfer learning to enhance the discriminative nature of the pre-trained backbone's features, thus achieving remarkable efficacy. While most current approaches emphasize feature transfer strategies, we argue that the optimization objective space within OCC methods could also be an underlying critical factor influencing performance. In this work, we conducted a thorough investigation into the optimization objective of OCC. Through rigorous theoretical analysis and derivation, we unveil a key insights: any space with the suitable norm can serve as an equivalent substitute for the hypersphere center, without relying on the distribution assumption of training samples. Further, we provide guidelines for determining the feasible domain of norms for the OCC optimization objective. This novel insight sparks a simple and data-agnostic deep one-class classification method. Our method is straightforward, with a single 1x1 convolutional layer as a trainable projector and any space with suitable norm as the optimization objective. Extensive experiments validate the reliability and efficacy of our findings and the corresponding methodology, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in both one-class classification and industrial vision anomaly detection and segmentation tasks.

The Second-place Solution for CVPR VISION 23 Challenge Track 1 -- Data Effificient Defect Detection

The Vision Challenge Track 1 for Data-Effificient Defect Detection requires competitors to instance segment 14 industrial inspection datasets in a data-defificient setting. This report introduces the technical details of the team Aoi-overfifitting-Team for this challenge. Our method focuses on the key problem of segmentation quality of defect masks in scenarios with limited training samples. Based on the Hybrid Task Cascade (HTC) instance segmentation algorithm, we connect the transformer backbone (Swin-B) through composite connections inspired by CBNetv2 to enhance the baseline results. Additionally, we propose two model ensemble methods to further enhance the segmentation effect: one incorporates semantic segmentation into instance segmentation, while the other employs multi-instance segmentation fusion algorithms. Finally, using multi-scale training and test-time augmentation (TTA), we achieve an average mAP@0.50:0.95 of more than 48.49% and an average mAR@0.50:0.95 of 66.71% on the test set of the Data Effificient Defect Detection Challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/love6tao/Aoi-overfitting-team

Towards Total Online Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization in Industrial Vision

Although existing image anomaly detection methods yield impressive results, they are mostly an offline learning paradigm that requires excessive data pre-collection, limiting their adaptability in industrial scenarios with online streaming data. Online learning-based image anomaly detection methods are more compatible with industrial online streaming data but are rarely noticed. For the first time, this paper presents a fully online learning image anomaly detection method, namely LeMO, learning memory for online image anomaly detection. LeMO leverages learnable memory initialized with orthogonal random noise, eliminating the need for excessive data in memory initialization and circumventing the inefficiencies of offline data collection. Moreover, a contrastive learning-based loss function for anomaly detection is designed to enable online joint optimization of memory and image target-oriented features. The presented method is simple and highly effective. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of LeMO in the online setting. Additionally, in the offline setting, LeMO is also competitive with the current state-of-the-art methods and achieves excellent performance in few-shot scenarios.