Despite the rapid advance of unsupervised anomaly detection, existing methods require to train separate models for different objects. In this work, we present UniAD that accomplishes anomaly detection for multiple classes with a unified framework. Under such a challenging setting, popular reconstruction networks may fall into an "identical shortcut", where both normal and anomalous samples can be well recovered, and hence fail to spot outliers. To tackle this obstacle, we make three improvements. First, we revisit the formulations of fully-connected layer, convolutional layer, as well as attention layer, and confirm the important role of query embedding (i.e., within attention layer) in preventing the network from learning the shortcut.

However, two significant challenges hinder its research and application. First, existing datasets lack comprehensive visual information from various pose angles.

Unsupervised anomaly detection aims to detect defective parts of a sample by having access, during training, to a set of normal, i.e. defect-free, data. It has many applications in fields, such as industrial inspection or medical imaging, where acquiring labels is costly or when we want to avoid introducing biases in the type of anomalies that can be spotted. In this work, we propose a novel UAD method based on prototype learning and introduce a metric to compare a structured set of embeddings that balances a feature-based cost and a spatial-based cost. We leverage this metric to learn local and global prototypes with optimal transport from latent representations extracted with a pre-trained image encoder. We demonstrate that our approach can enforce a structural constraint when learning the prototypes, allowing to capture the underlying organization of the normal samples, thus improving the detection of incoherencies in images. Our model achieves performance that is on par with strong baselines on two reference benchmarks for anomaly detection on industrial images.

Anomaly detection and localization in automated industrial manufacturing can significantly enhance production efficiency and product quality. Existing methods are capable of detecting surface defects in pre-defined or controlled imaging environments. However, accurately detecting workpiece defects in complex and unstructured industrial environments with varying views, poses and illumination remains challenging. We propose a novel anomaly detection and localization method specifically designed to handle inputs with perturbative patterns. Our approach introduces a new framework based on a collaborative distillation heterogeneous teacher network (HetNet), an adaptive local-global feature fusion module, and a local multivariate Gaussian noise generation module. HetNet can learn to model the complex feature distribution of normal patterns using limited information about local disruptive changes. We conducted extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks. HetNet demonstrates superior performance with approximately 10% improvement across all evaluation metrics on MSC-AD under industrial conditions, while achieving state-of-the-art results on other datasets, validating its resilience to environmental fluctuations and its capability to enhance the reliability of industrial anomaly detection systems across diverse scenarios. Tests in real-world environments further confirm that HetNet can be effectively integrated into production lines to achieve robust and real-time anomaly detection. Codes, images and videos are published on the project website at: https://zihuatanejoyu.github.io/HetNet/

Unsupervised reconstruction networks using self-attention transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance for multi-class (unified) anomaly detection with a single model. However, these self-attention reconstruction models primarily operate on target features, which may result in perfect reconstruction for both normal and anomaly features due to high consistency with context, leading to failure in detecting anomalies. Additionally, these models often produce inaccurate anomaly segmentation due to performing reconstruction in a low spatial resolution latent space. To enable reconstruction models enjoying high efficiency while enhancing their generalization for unified anomaly detection, we propose a simple yet effective method that reconstructs normal features and restores anomaly features with just One Normal Image Prompt (OneNIP). In contrast to previous work, OneNIP allows for the first time to reconstruct or restore anomalies with just one normal image prompt, effectively boosting unified anomaly detection performance. Furthermore, we propose a supervised refiner that regresses reconstruction errors by using both real normal and synthesized anomalous images, which significantly improves pixel-level anomaly segmentation. OneNIP outperforms previous methods on three industry anomaly detection benchmarks: MVTec, BTAD, and VisA. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/gaobb/OneNIP.

Large pretrained vision foundation models have shown significant potential in various vision tasks. However, for industrial anomaly detection, the scarcity of real defect samples poses a critical challenge in leveraging these models. While 2D anomaly generation has significantly advanced with established generative models, the adoption of 3D sensors in industrial manufacturing has made leveraging 3D data for surface quality inspection an emerging trend. In contrast to 2D techniques, 3D anomaly generation remains largely unexplored, limiting the potential of 3D data in industrial quality inspection. To address this gap, we propose a novel yet simple 3D anomaly generation method, 3D-PNAS, based on Perlin noise and surface parameterization. Our method generates realistic 3D surface anomalies by projecting the point cloud onto a 2D plane, sampling multi-scale noise values from a Perlin noise field, and perturbing the point cloud along its normal direction. Through comprehensive visualization experiments, we demonstrate how key parameters - including noise scale, perturbation strength, and octaves, provide fine-grained control over the generated anomalies, enabling the creation of diverse defect patterns from pronounced deformations to subtle surface variations. Additionally, our cross-category experiments show that the method produces consistent yet geometrically plausible anomalies across different object types, adapting to their specific surface characteristics. We also provide a comprehensive codebase and visualization toolkit to facilitate future research.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is a fundamental tool for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions, yet anomaly detection in ECG signals remains challenging due to their inherent complexity and variability. We propose Multi-scale Masked Autoencoder for ECG anomaly detection (MMAE-ECG), a novel end-to-end framework that effectively captures both global and local dependencies in ECG data. Unlike state-of-the-art methods that rely on heartbeat segmentation or R-peak detection, MMAE-ECG eliminates the need for such pre-processing steps, enhancing its suitability for clinical deployment. MMAE-ECG partitions ECG signals into non-overlapping segments, with each segment assigned learnable positional embeddings. A novel multi-scale masking strategy and multi-scale attention mechanism, along with distinct positional embeddings, enable a lightweight Transformer encoder to effectively capture both local and global dependencies. The masked segments are then reconstructed using a single-layer Transformer block, with an aggregation strategy employed during inference to refine the outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art approaches while significantly reducing computational complexity-approximately 1/78 of the floating-point operations (FLOPs) required for inference. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component, highlighting the potential of multi-scale masked autoencoders for anomaly detection.

Unsupervised anomaly detection methods can identify surface defects in industrial images by leveraging only normal samples for training. Due to the risk of overfitting when learning from a single class, anomaly synthesis strategies are introduced to enhance detection capability by generating artificial anomalies. However, existing strategies heavily rely on anomalous textures from auxiliary datasets. Moreover, their limitations in the coverage and directionality of anomaly synthesis may result in a failure to capture useful information and lead to significant redundancy. To address these issues, we propose a novel Progressive Boundary-guided Anomaly Synthesis (PBAS) strategy, which can directionally synthesize crucial feature-level anomalies without auxiliary textures. It consists of three core components: Approximate Boundary Learning (ABL), Anomaly Feature Synthesis (AFS), and Refined Boundary Optimization (RBO). To make the distribution of normal samples more compact, ABL first learns an approximate decision boundary by center constraint, which improves the center initialization through feature alignment. AFS then directionally synthesizes anomalies with more flexible scales guided by the hypersphere distribution of normal features. Since the boundary is so loose that it may contain real anomalies, RBO refines the decision boundary through the binary classification of artificial anomalies and normal features. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and the fastest detection speed on three widely used industrial datasets, including MVTec AD, VisA, and MPDD. The code will be available at: https://github.com/cqylunlun/PBAS.

In unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) research, while state-of-the-art models have reached a saturation point with extensive studies on public benchmark datasets, they adopt large-scale tailor-made neural networks (NN) for detection performance or pursued unified models for various tasks. Towards edge computing, it is necessary to develop a computationally efficient and scalable solution that avoids large-scale complex NNs. Motivated by this, we aim to optimize the UAD performance with minimal changes to NN settings. Thus, we revisit the reconstruction-by-inpainting approach and rethink to improve it by analyzing strengths and weaknesses. The strength of the SOTA methods is a single deterministic masking approach that addresses the challenges of random multiple masking that is inference latency and output inconsistency. Nevertheless, the issue of failure to provide a mask to completely cover anomalous regions is a remaining weakness. To mitigate this issue, we propose Feature Attenuation of Defective Representation (FADeR) that only employs two MLP layers which attenuates feature information of anomaly reconstruction during decoding. By leveraging FADeR, features of unseen anomaly patterns are reconstructed into seen normal patterns, reducing false alarms. Experimental results demonstrate that FADeR achieves enhanced performance compared to similar-scale NNs. Furthermore, our approach exhibits scalability in performance enhancement when integrated with other single deterministic masking methods in a plug-and-play manner.