Single-Step Reconstruction-Free Anomaly Detection and Segmentation via Diffusion Models

Generative models have demonstrated significant success in anomaly detection and segmentation over the past decade. Recently, diffusion models have emerged as a powerful alternative, outperforming previous approaches such as GANs and VAEs. In typical diffusion-based anomaly detection, a model is trained on normal data, and during inference, anomalous images are perturbed to a predefined intermediate step in the forward diffusion process. The corresponding normal image is then reconstructed through iterative reverse sampling. However, reconstruction-based approaches present three major challenges: (1) the reconstruction process is computationally expensive due to multiple sampling steps, making real-time applications impractical; (2) for complex or subtle patterns, the reconstructed image may correspond to a different normal pattern rather than the original input; and (3) Choosing an appropriate intermediate noise level is challenging because it is application-dependent and often assumes prior knowledge of anomalies, an assumption that does not hold in unsupervised settings. We introduce Reconstruction-free Anomaly Detection with Attention-based diffusion models in Real-time (RADAR), which overcomes the limitations of reconstruction-based anomaly detection. Unlike current SOTA methods that reconstruct the input image, RADAR directly produces anomaly maps from the diffusion model, improving both detection accuracy and computational efficiency. We evaluate RADAR on real-world 3D-printed material and the MVTec-AD dataset. Our approach surpasses state-of-the-art diffusion-based and statistical machine learning models across all key metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Specifically, RADAR improves F1 score by 7% on MVTec-AD and 13% on the 3D-printed material dataset compared to the next best model. Code available at: https://github.com/mehrdadmoradi124/RADAR