# A Hierarchically Feature Reconstructed Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09148/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [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)
- [GANomaly: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06725/) (2018)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [Sub-Image Anomaly Detection with Deep Pyramid Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02357/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Latent Space Autoregression for Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01653/) (2018)
- [Modeling the Distribution of Normal Data in Pre-Trained Deep Features for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14140/) (2020)
- [Iterative energy-based projection on a normal data manifold for anomaly localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03734/) (2020)
- [Deep Transfer Learning for Multiple Class Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02196/) (2019)
- [ARAE: Adversarially Robust Training of Autoencoders Improves Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05669/) (2020)
- [q-Space Novelty Detection with Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02997/) (2018)
- [Attention Guided Anomaly Localization in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08616/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection and localization without any manual annotations and prior knowledge is a challenging task under the setting of unsupervised learning. The existing works achieve excellent performance in the anomaly detection, but with complex networks or cumbersome pipelines. To address this issue, this paper explores a simple but effective architecture in the anomaly detection. It consists of a well pre-trained encoder to extract hierarchical feature representations and a decoder to reconstruct these intermediate features from the encoder. In particular, it does not require any data augmentations and anomalous images for training. The anomalies can be detected when the decoder fails to reconstruct features well, and then errors of hierarchical feature reconstruction are aggregated into an anomaly map to achieve anomaly localization. The difference comparison between those features of encoder and decode lead to more accurate and robust localization results than the comparison in single feature or pixel-by-pixel comparison in the conventional works. Experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and MVTec Anomaly Detection datasets on both anomaly detection and localization.