Xuanming Cao

Xuanming Cao, Chengyu Tao, Juan Du

Surface anomaly classification is critical for manufacturing system fault diagnosis and quality control. However, the following challenges always hinder accurate anomaly classification in practice: (i) Anomaly patterns exhibit intra-class variation and inter-class similarity, presenting challenges in the accurate classification of each sample. (ii) Despite the predefined classes, new types of anomalies can occur during production that require to be detected accurately. (iii) Anomalous data is rare in manufacturing processes, leading to limited data for model learning. To tackle the above challenges simultaneously, this paper proposes a novel deep subspace learning-based 3D anomaly classification model. Specifically, starting from a lightweight encoder to extract the latent representations, we model each class as a subspace to account for the intra-class variation, while promoting distinct subspaces of different classes to tackle the inter-class similarity. Moreover, the explicit modeling of subspaces offers the capability to detect out-of-distribution samples, i.e., new types of anomalies, and the regularization effect with much fewer learnable parameters of our proposed subspace classifier, compared to the popular Multi-Layer Perceptions (MLPs). Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate our method achieves better anomaly classification results than benchmark methods, and can effectively identify the new types of anomalies.

Xuanming Cao, Chengyu Tao, Yifeng Cheng et al.

Surface anomaly detection is pivotal for ensuring product quality in industrial manufacturing. While 2D image-based methods have achieved remarkable success, 3D point cloud-based detection remains underexplored despite its richer geometric cues. We argue that the key bottleneck is the absence of powerful pretrained foundation backbones in 3D comparable to those in 2D. To bridge this gap, we propose Importance-Aware Ensemble Network (IAENet), an ensemble framework that synergizes 2D pretrained expert with 3D expert models. However, naively fusing predictions from disparate sources is non-trivial: existing strategies can be affected by a poorly performing modality and thus degrade overall accuracy. To address this challenge, We introduce an novel Importance-Aware Fusion (IAF) module that dynamically assesses the contribution of each source and reweights their anomaly scores. Furthermore, we devise critical loss functions that explicitly guide the optimization of IAF, enabling it to combine the collective knowledge of the source experts but also preserve their unique strengths, thereby enhancing the overall performance of anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on MVTec 3D-AD demonstrate that our IAENet achieves a new state-of-the-art with a markedly lower false positive rate, underscoring its practical value for industrial deployment.