GLAD: A Global-to-Local Anomaly Detector

Aitor Artola, Yannis Kolodziej, Jean-Michel Morel, Thibaud Ehret; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 5501-5510

Learning to detect automatic anomalies in production plants remains a machine learning challenge. Since anomalies by definition cannot be learned, their detection must rely on a very accurate "normality model". To this aim, we introduce here a global-to-local Gaussian model for neural network features, learned from a set of normal images. This probabilistic model enables unsupervised anomaly detection. A global Gaussian mixture model of the features is first learned using all available features from normal data. This global Gaussian mixture model is then localized by an adaptation of the K-MLE algorithm, which learns a spatial weight map for each Gaussian. These weights are then used instead of the mixture weights to detect anomalies. This method enables precise modeling of complex data, even with limited data. Applied on WideResnet50-2 features, our approach outperforms the previous state of the art on the MVTec dataset, particularly on the object category. It is robust to perturbations that are frequent in production lines, such as imperfect alignment, and is on par in terms of memory and computation time with the previous state of the art.