# Normal Reference Attention and Defective Feature Perception Network for Surface Defect Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10060 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10060/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [Memorizing Normality to Detect Anomaly: Memory-augmented Deep Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02639/) (2019)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [GANomaly: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06725/) (2018)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11108/) (2020)
- [Improving Unsupervised Defect Segmentation by Applying Structural Similarity to Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02011/) (2018)
- [Patch SVDD: Patch-level SVDD for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16067/) (2020)
- [OCGAN: One-class Novelty Detection Using GANs with Constrained Latent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08550/) (2019)
- [PANDA: Adapting Pretrained Features for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05903/) (2020)
- [Skip-GANomaly: Skip Connected and Adversarially Trained Encoder-Decoder Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08954/) (2019)
- [Divide-and-Assemble: Learning Block-wise Memory for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13118/) (2021)
- [Iterative energy-based projection on a normal data manifold for anomaly localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03734/) (2020)
- [TrustMAE: A Noise-Resilient Defect Classification Framework using Memory-Augmented Auto-Encoders with Trust Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14629/) (2020)
- [Reconstruction from edge image combined with color and gradient difference for industrial surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14485/) (2022)
- [A Feature Memory Rearrangement Network for Visual Inspection of Textured Surface Defects Toward Edge Intelligent Manufacturing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10830/) (2022)
- [Siamese Transition Masked Autoencoders as Uniform Unsupervised Visual Anomaly Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00349/) (2022)
- [Clear Memory-Augmented Auto-Encoder for Surface Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03879/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Component-aware anomaly detection framework for adjustable and logical industrial visual inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08509/) (2023)
- [Boosting Global-Local Feature Matching via Anomaly Synthesis for Multi-Class Point Cloud Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07375/) (2025)
- [AMI-Net: Adaptive Mask Inpainting Network for Industrial Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11802/) (2024)
- [Foundation Models and Transformers for Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15905/) (2025)
- [PUAD: Frustratingly Simple Method for Robust Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15143/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey for Real-World Industrial Defect Detection: Challenges, Approaches, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13378/) (2025)
- [URA-Net: Uncertainty-Integrated Anomaly Perception and Restoration Attention Network for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22840/) (2026)
- [A Feature Shuffling and Restoration Strategy for Universal Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22861/) (2026)
- [Template-Based Feature Aggregation Network for Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22874/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual anomaly detection plays a significant role in the development of industrial automatic product quality inspection. As a result of the utmost imbalance in the amount of normal and abnormal data, growing attention has been given to unsupervised methods for defect detection. Although existing reconstruction-based methods have been widely studied recently, establishing a robust reconstruction model for various textured surface defect detection remains a challenging task due to homogeneous and nonregular surface textures. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised reconstruction-based method called the normal reference attention and defective feature perception network (NDP-Net) to accurately inspect a variety of textured defects. Unlike most reconstruction-based methods, our NDP-Net first employs an encoding module that extracts multi scale discriminative features of the surface textures, which is augmented with the defect discriminative ability by the proposed artificial defects and the novel pixel-level defect perception loss. Subsequently, a novel reference-based attention module (RBAM) is proposed to leverage the normal features of the fixed reference image to repair the defective features and restrain the reconstruction of the defects. Next, the repaired features are fed into a decoding module to reconstruct the normal textured background. Finally, the novel multi scale defect segmentation module (MSDSM) is introduced for precise defect detection and segmentation. In addition, a two-stage training strategy is utilized to enhance the inspection performance.