UniSpector: Towards Universal Open-set Defect Recognition via Spectral-Contrastive Visual Prompting
This addresses the need for scalable, retraining-free inspection systems in industrial environments to detect novel defects, representing a domain-specific advancement.
The paper tackles the problem of open-set defect recognition in industrial inspection by proposing UniSpector, a method that uses spectral-contrastive visual prompting to avoid prompt embedding collapse, resulting in significant performance gains of at least 19.7% and 15.8% in AP50b and AP50m metrics on a new benchmark.
Although industrial inspection systems should be capable of recognizing unprecedented defects, most existing approaches operate under a closed-set assumption, which prevents them from detecting novel anomalies. While visual prompting offers a scalable alternative for industrial inspection, existing methods often suffer from prompt embedding collapse due to high intra-class variance and subtle inter-class differences. To resolve this, we propose UniSpector, which shifts the focus from naive prompt-to-region matching to the principled design of a semantically structured and transferable prompt topology. UniSpector employs the Spatial-Spectral Prompt Encoder to extract orientation-invariant, fine-grained representations; these serve as a solid basis for the Contrastive Prompt Encoder to explicitly regularize the prompt space into a semantically organized angular manifold. Additionally, Prompt-guided Query Selection generates adaptive object queries aligned with the prompt. We introduce Inspect Anything, the first benchmark for visual-prompt-based open-set defect localization, where UniSpector significantly outperforms baselines by at least 19.7% and 15.8% in AP50b and AP50m, respectively. These results show that our method enable a scalable, retraining-free inspection paradigm for continuously evolving industrial environments, while offering critical insights into the design of generic visual prompting.