Ensembled Cold-Diffusion Restorations for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
This work addresses the challenge of detecting subtle anomalies in medical imaging, offering improved interpretability and performance, though it appears incremental by building on existing generative and synthetic methods.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying subtle anomalies in unsupervised anomaly detection by combining generative and synthetic anomaly-based strategies, achieving state-of-the-art results on three Brain MRI datasets.
Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) methods aim to identify anomalies in test samples comparing them with a normative distribution learned from a dataset known to be anomaly-free. Approaches based on generative models offer interpretability by generating anomaly-free versions of test images, but are typically unable to identify subtle anomalies. Alternatively, approaches using feature modelling or self-supervised methods, such as the ones relying on synthetically generated anomalies, do not provide out-of-the-box interpretability. In this work, we present a novel method that combines the strengths of both strategies: a generative cold-diffusion pipeline (i.e., a diffusion-like pipeline which uses corruptions not based on noise) that is trained with the objective of turning synthetically-corrupted images back to their normal, original appearance. To support our pipeline we introduce a novel synthetic anomaly generation procedure, called DAG, and a novel anomaly score which ensembles restorations conditioned with different degrees of abnormality. Our method surpasses the prior state-of-the art for unsupervised anomaly detection in three different Brain MRI datasets.