Few-Shot Anomaly Detection via Category-Agnostic Registration Learning
This addresses the computational cost problem for real-world anomaly detection applications by enabling a single model to handle multiple categories without fine-tuning.
The paper tackles the inefficiency of anomaly detection methods that require separate models for each category by proposing a few-shot framework using category-agnostic registration learning, achieving state-of-the-art improvements of 11.3% on MVTec and 8.3% on MPDD benchmarks.
Most existing anomaly detection (AD) methods require a dedicated model for each category. Such a paradigm, despite its promising results, is computationally expensive and inefficient, thereby failing to meet the requirements for realworld applications. Inspired by how humans detect anomalies, by comparing a query image to known normal ones, this article proposes a novel few-shot AD (FSAD) framework. Using a training set of normal images from various categories, registration, aiming to align normal images of the same categories, is leveraged as the proxy task for self-supervised category-agnostic representation learning. At test time, an image and its corresponding support set, consisting of a few normal images from the same category, are supplied, and anomalies are identified by comparing the registered features of the test image to its corresponding support image features. Such a setup enables the model to generalize to novel test categories. It is, to our best knowledge, the first FSAD method that requires no model fine-tuning for novel categories: enabling a single model to be applied to all categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Particularly, it improves the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) for FSAD by 11.3% and 8.3% on the MVTec and MPDD benchmarks, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/Haoyan-Guan/CAReg.