# A Lightweight 3D Anomaly Detection Method with Rotationally Invariant Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13115/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Memorizing Normality to Detect Anomaly: Memory-augmented Deep Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02639/) (2019)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [The MVTec 3D-AD Dataset for Unsupervised 3D Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09045/) (2021)
- [Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14508/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Anomaly Detection: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02500/) (2020)
- [SpinNet: Learning a General Surface Descriptor for 3D Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12149/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection via Hybrid Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00601/) (2023)
- [AdaCLIP: Adapting CLIP with Hybrid Learnable Prompts for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15795/) (2024)
- [Catching Both Gray and Black Swans: Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14506/) (2022)
- [Back to the Feature: Classical 3D Features are (Almost) All You Need for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05550/) (2022)
- [Real3D-AD: A Dataset of Point Cloud Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13226/) (2023)
- [Omni-frequency Channel-selection Representations for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00259/) (2022)
- [Complementary Pseudo Multimodal Feature for Point Cloud Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13194/) (2023)
- [Towards Scalable 3D Anomaly Detection and Localization: A Benchmark via 3D Anomaly Synthesis and A Self-Supervised Learning Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14897/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Discrepancy Optimization for Reliable Image Anomaly Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08769/) (2023)
- [Prototypical Residual Networks for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02031/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Anomaly Heterogeneity Learning for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12790/) (2023)
- [SplatPose & Detect: Pose-Agnostic 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06832/) (2024)
- [Towards High-resolution 3D Anomaly Detection via Group-Level Feature Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04604/) (2024)
- [MC3D-AD: A Unified Geometry-aware Reconstruction Model for Multi-category 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01969/) (2025)
- [Continuous Memory Representation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18293/) (2024)
- [Boosting Global-Local Feature Matching via Anomaly Synthesis for Multi-Class Point Cloud Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07375/) (2025)
- [Towards High-Resolution 3D Anomaly Detection: A Scalable Dataset and Real-Time Framework for Subtle Industrial Defects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07435/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Is Task-Specific Training Necessary for Anomaly Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22763/) (2026)
- [Physics-inspired Pseudo Anomaly Generation and Prototype Feature Guidance for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10544/) (2026)
- [Open-Set Supervised 3D Anomaly Detection: An Industrial Dataset and a Generalisable Framework for Unknown Defects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01171/) (2026)
- [Learning Discriminative Signed Distance Functions from Multi-scale Level-of-detail Features for 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03437/) (2026)
- [MVFM-3DAD: Multi-view Flow Matching for 3D Anomaly Detection via Density Proxy Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12148/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D anomaly detection (AD) is a crucial task in computer vision, aiming to identify anomalous points or regions from point cloud data. However, existing methods may encounter challenges when handling point clouds with changes in orientation and position because the resulting features may vary significantly. To address this problem, we propose a novel Rotationally Invariant Features (RIF) framework for 3D AD. Firstly, to remove the adverse effect of variations on point cloud data, we develop a Point Coordinate Mapping (PCM) technique, which maps each point into a rotationally invariant space to maintain consistency of representation. Then, to learn robust and discriminative features, we design a lightweight Convolutional Transform Feature Network (CTF-Net) to extract rotationally invariant features for the memory bank. To improve the ability of the feature extractor, we introduce the idea of transfer learning to pre-train the feature extractor with 3D data augmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the advanced performance on the Anomaly-ShapeNet dataset, with an average P-AUROC improvement of 17.7%, and also gains the best performance on the Real3D-AD dataset, with an average P-AUROC improvement of 1.6%. The strong generalization ability of RIF has been verified by combining it with traditional feature extraction methods on anomaly detection tasks, demonstrating great potential for industrial applications.