Hard-normal Example-aware Template Mutual Matching for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detectors are widely used in industrial manufacturing to detect and localize unknown defects in query images. These detectors are trained on anomaly-free samples and have successfully distinguished anomalies from most normal samples. However, hard-normal examples are scattered and far apart from most normal samples, and thus they are often mistaken for anomalies by existing methods. To address this issue, we propose Hard-normal Example-aware Template Mutual Matching (HETMM), an efficient framework to build a robust prototype-based decision boundary. Specifically, HETMM employs the proposed Affine-invariant Template Mutual Matching (ATMM) to mitigate the affection brought by the affine transformations and easy-normal examples. By mutually matching the pixel-level prototypes within the patch-level search spaces between query and template set, ATMM can accurately distinguish between hard-normal examples and anomalies, achieving low false-positive and missed-detection rates. In addition, we also propose PTS to compress the original template set for speed-up. PTS selects cluster centres and hard-normal examples to preserve the original decision boundary, allowing this tiny set to achieve comparable performance to the original one. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HETMM outperforms state-of-the-art methods, while using a 60-sheet tiny set can achieve competitive performance and real-time inference speed (around 26.1 FPS) on a Quadro 8000 RTX GPU. HETMM is training-free and can be hot-updated by directly inserting novel samples into the template set, which can promptly address some incremental learning issues in industrial manufacturing.