Julio Zanon Diaz, Georgios Siogkas, Peter Corcoran
Automated visual inspection in medical-device manufacturing faces unique challenges, including extremely low defect rates, limited annotated data, hardware restrictions on production lines, and the need for validated, explainable artificial-intelligence systems. This paper presents two attention-guided autoencoder architectures that address these constraints through complementary anomaly-detection strategies. The first employs a multi-scale structural-similarity (4-MS-SSIM) index for inline inspection, enabling interpretable, real-time defect detection on constrained hardware. The second applies a Mahalanobis-distance analysis of randomly reduced latent features for efficient feature-space monitoring and lifecycle verification. Both approaches share a lightweight backbone optimised for high-resolution imagery for typical manufacturing conditions. Evaluations on the Surface Seal Image (SSI) dataset-representing sterile-barrier packaging inspection-demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform reference baselines, including MOCCA, CPCAE, and RAG-PaDiM, under realistic industrial constraints. Cross-domain validation on the MVTec-Zipper benchmark confirms comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art anomaly-detection methods. The dual-mode framework integrates inline anomaly detection and supervisory monitoring, advancing explainable AI architectures toward greater reliability, observability, and lifecycle monitoring in safety-critical manufacturing environments. To facilitate reproducibility, the source code developed for the experiments has been released in the project repository, while the datasets were obtained from publicly available sources.