# Multi-Scale Distillation for RGB-D Anomaly Detection on the PD-REAL Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [Future Frame Prediction for Anomaly Detection -- A New Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09867/) (2017)
- [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)
- [PandaSet: Advanced Sensor Suite Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12610/) (2021)
- [The MVTec 3D-AD Dataset for Unsupervised 3D Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09045/) (2021)
- [Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04257/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection via Hybrid Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00601/) (2023)
- [MemSeg: A semi-supervised method for image surface defect detection using differences and commonalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00908/) (2022)
- [Anomaly Detection in 3D Point Clouds using Deep Geometric Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11660/) (2022)
- [The Eyecandies Dataset for Unsupervised Multimodal Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04570/) (2022)
- [EasyNet: An Easy Network for 3D Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13925/) (2023)
- [Toward Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Anomaly Detection using Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03420/) (2023)
- [Teacher-Student Network for 3D Point Cloud Anomaly Detection with Few Normal Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17258/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Revisiting Multimodal Fusion for 3D Anomaly Detection from an Architectural Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17297/) (2024)
- [EIAD: Explainable Industrial Anomaly Detection Via Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14162/) (2025)
- [Reasoning-Driven Anomaly Detection and Localization with Image-Level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27179/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present PD-REAL, a novel large-scale dataset for unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) in the 3D domain. It is motivated by the fact that 2D-only representations in the AD task may fail to capture the geometric structures of anomalies due to uncertainty in lighting conditions or shooting angles. PD-REAL consists entirely of Play-Doh models for 15 object categories and focuses on the analysis of potential benefits from 3D information in a controlled environment. Specifically, objects are first created with six types of anomalies, such as textitdent, textitcrack, or textitperforation, and then photographed under different lighting conditions to mimic real-world inspection scenarios. To demonstrate the usefulness of 3D information, we use a commercially available RealSense camera to capture RGB and depth images. Compared to the existing 3D dataset for AD tasks, the data acquisition of PD-REAL is significantly cheaper, easily scalable, and easier to control variables. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-scale teacher--student framework with hierarchical distillation for multimodal anomaly detection. This architecture overcomes the inherent limitation of single-scale distillation approaches, which often struggle to reconcile global context with local features. Leveraging multi-level guidance from the teacher network, the student network can effectively capture richer features for anomaly detection. Extensive evaluations with our method and state-of-the-art AD algorithms on our dataset qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the higher detection accuracy of our method. Our dataset can be downloaded from https://github.com/Andy-cs008/PD-REAL