Single-Layer Distillation with Fourier Convolutions for Texture Anomaly Detection

Simon Thomine, Hichem Snoussi; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 8962-8971

In industrial quality control detecting anomalies in visual textures is essential for ensuring product quality and operational efficiency. Early identification of defects prevents faulty items from reaching consumers reduces waste and maintains high standards of production. Numerous unsupervised anomaly detection methods heavily depend on the integration of multiple layers from various pre-trained models a selection often made through empirical means. We propose SingleNet an innovative knowledge distillation approach tailored for fast unsupervised texture anomaly detection using a single layer from a compact pre-trained model. Contrary to the previous knowledge distillation approaches our network leverages fast Fourier convolutions (FFC) to reconstruct a degraded version of the teacher extracted features. At test time we employed a frequency-aware filtering mechanism to reduce reconstruction artifacts caused by discrepancies between teacher and student architectures. Empirical results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach attaining state-of-the-art performance across evaluated datasets coupled with expedited high-speed inference.