IQE-CLIP: Instance-aware Query Embedding for Zero-/Few-shot Anomaly Detection in Medical Domain
This addresses the challenge of adapting CLIP-based methods to medical anomaly detection without prior category knowledge, though it is incremental as it builds on existing vision-language models.
The paper tackles the problem of zero-/few-shot anomaly detection in medical images by proposing IQE-CLIP, which uses instance-aware query embeddings to better distinguish anomalies, achieving state-of-the-art results on six medical datasets.
Recently, the rapid advancements of vision-language models, such as CLIP, leads to significant progress in zero-/few-shot anomaly detection (ZFSAD) tasks. However, most existing CLIP-based ZFSAD methods commonly assume prior knowledge of categories and rely on carefully crafted prompts tailored to specific scenarios. While such meticulously designed text prompts effectively capture semantic information in the textual space, they fall short of distinguishing normal and anomalous instances within the joint embedding space. Moreover, these ZFSAD methods are predominantly explored in industrial scenarios, with few efforts conducted to medical tasks. To this end, we propose an innovative framework for ZFSAD tasks in medical domain, denoted as IQE-CLIP. We reveal that query embeddings, which incorporate both textual and instance-aware visual information, are better indicators for abnormalities. Specifically, we first introduce class-based prompting tokens and learnable prompting tokens for better adaptation of CLIP to the medical domain. Then, we design an instance-aware query module (IQM) to extract region-level contextual information from both text prompts and visual features, enabling the generation of query embeddings that are more sensitive to anomalies. Extensive experiments conducted on six medical datasets demonstrate that IQE-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on both zero-shot and few-shot tasks. We release our code and data at https://github.com/hongh0/IQE-CLIP/.