# RealNet: A Feature Selection Network with Realistic Synthetic Anomaly for Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05897 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05897/

## Key facts

- Cited by 116 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10703/) (2022)
- [SPot-the-Difference Self-Supervised Pre-training for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14315/) (2022)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [CFLOW-AD: Real-Time Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Localization via Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12571/) (2021)
- [Sub-Image Anomaly Detection with Deep Pyramid Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02357/) (2020)
- [A Unified Model for Multi-class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03687/) (2022)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [FastFlow: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization via 2D Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07677/) (2021)
- [VT-ADL: A Vision Transformer Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10036/) (2021)
- [Patch SVDD: Patch-level SVDD for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16067/) (2020)
- [DeSTSeg: Segmentation Guided Denoising Student-Teacher for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11317/) (2022)
- [Deep Autoencoding Models for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation in Brain MR Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04488/) (2018)
- [Explainable Deep One-Class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01760/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Predictive Convolutional Attentive Block for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09099/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 116)

- [Dinomaly: The Less Is More Philosophy in Multi-Class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14325/) (2024)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07601/) (2025)
- [Exploring Intrinsic Normal Prototypes within a Single Image for Universal Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02424/) (2025)
- [R3D-AD: Reconstruction via Diffusion for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10862/) (2024)
- [PO3AD: Predicting Point Offsets toward Better 3D Point Cloud Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12617/) (2024)
- [SeaS: Few-shot Industrial Anomaly Image Generation with Separation and Sharing Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14987/) (2024)
- [MANTA: A Large-Scale Multi-View and Visual-Text Anomaly Detection Dataset for Tiny Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04867/) (2024)
- [Unseen Visual Anomaly Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01078/) (2024)
- [Progressive Boundary Guided Anomaly Synthesis for Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17458/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning Advancements in Anomaly Detection: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13195/) (2025)
- [Boosting Global-Local Feature Matching via Anomaly Synthesis for Multi-Class Point Cloud Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07375/) (2025)
- [Salvaging the Overlooked: Leveraging Class-Aware Contrastive Learning for Multi-Class Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04769/) (2024)
- [Normal-Abnormal Guided Generalist Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00495/) (2025)
- [FUN-AD: Fully Unsupervised Learning for Anomaly Detection with Noisy Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16110/) (2024)
- [Unlocking the Potential of Reverse Distillation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07579/) (2024)
- [Triad: Empowering LMM-based Anomaly Detection with Vision Expert-guided Visual Tokenizer and Manufacturing Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13184/) (2025)
- [Anomaly Detection and Generation with Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09368/) (2025)
- [AD-FM: Multimodal LLMs for Anomaly Detection via Multi-Stage Reasoning and Fine-Grained Reward Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04175/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Library for Benchmarking Multi-class Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03262/) (2024)
- [AnomalyControl: Learning Cross-modal Semantic Features for Controllable Anomaly Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06510/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Industrial Anomaly Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16412/) (2025)
- [INP-Former++: Advancing Universal Anomaly Detection via Intrinsic Normal Prototypes and Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03660/) (2025)
- [Commonality in Few: Few-Shot Multimodal Anomaly Detection via Hypergraph-Enhanced Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05966/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Foundation-Model-Based Industrial Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19106/) (2025)
- [AnomalyPainter: Vision-Language-Diffusion Synergy for Zero-Shot Realistic and Diverse Industrial Anomaly Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07253/) (2025)
- [Robust Distribution Alignment for Industrial Anomaly Detection under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14910/) (2025)
- [Multi-Flow: Multi-View-Enriched Normalizing Flows for Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03306/) (2025)
- [CostFilter-AD: Enhancing Anomaly Detection through Matching Cost Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01476/) (2025)
- [Foundation Visual Encoders Are Secretly Few-Shot Anomaly Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01934/) (2025)
- [AnoStyler: Text-Driven Localized Anomaly Generation via Lightweight Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06687/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised feature reconstruction methods have shown promising advances in industrial image anomaly detection and localization. Despite this progress, these methods still face challenges in synthesizing realistic and diverse anomaly samples, as well as addressing the feature redundancy and pre-training bias of pre-trained feature. In this work, we introduce RealNet, a feature reconstruction network with realistic synthetic anomaly and adaptive feature selection. It is incorporated with three key innovations: First, we propose Strength-controllable Diffusion Anomaly Synthesis (SDAS), a diffusion process-based synthesis strategy capable of generating samples with varying anomaly strengths that mimic the distribution of real anomalous samples. Second, we develop Anomaly-aware Features Selection (AFS), a method for selecting representative and discriminative pre-trained feature subsets to improve anomaly detection performance while controlling computational costs. Third, we introduce Reconstruction Residuals Selection (RRS), a strategy that adaptively selects discriminative residuals for comprehensive identification of anomalous regions across multiple levels of granularity. We assess RealNet on four benchmark datasets, and our results demonstrate significant improvements in both Image AUROC and Pixel AUROC compared to the current state-o-the-art methods. The code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/cnulab/RealNet.