# Low Cost Two-Stage Fabric Defect Detection at the Edge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14727 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14727/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [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)
- [A Unifying Review of Deep and Shallow Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11732/) (2020)
- [Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10703/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [EfficientAD: Accurate Visual Anomaly Detection at Millisecond-Level Latencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14535/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fabric inspection in the garment industries of low-income economies remains largely manual, and commercial vision systems are priced beyond most small and medium mills. Because defects are sparse under controlled production, a natural response is a cascade: screen every frame with a cheap anomaly detector and invoke a full detector only on suspicious frames. We build such a cascade for four knit-fabric defect classes and deploy it end-to-end on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano with TensorRT FP16. Stage 1 is a compact convolutional autoencoder with decoder attention gates, an edge-weighted reconstruction loss, and feature-level distillation from a frozen YOLOv5n teacher; Stage 2 is YOLOv5n, invoked only on flagged frames. On a 249-image benchmark disjoint from detector training (20 defective, 229 non-defective), Stage 1 at a recall-prioritised threshold flags all 20 defective images (95% CI 0.83-1.00) at a false-positive rate of 49.3% (113/229), reducing false positives by 19.3% relative to a plain autoencoder (p=0.011). The parallel pipeline reaches 13.45 FPS against 9.86 FPS for a sequential YOLO-only loop. Our central finding comes from decomposing that 1.36x: 91% of it is attributable to overlapping JPEG decode with inference rather than to the cascade, which contributes only a 5.1% inference reduction at the measured forwarding rate p = 0.534. We further show that forwarding here is false-positive-limited rather than prevalence-limited - 85% of forwarded frames are false alarms - and quantify the 29-45% inference reduction attainable under tighter calibration. We report this as a caution for cascade speedups measured without controlling the data path, and position the system as AI-assisted triage rather than autonomous acceptance.