Visual Anomaly Detection Via Partition Memory Bank Module and Error Estimation

Abstract: Reconstruction method based on the memory module for visual anomaly detection attempts to narrow the reconstruction error for normal samples while enlarging it for anomalous samples. Unfortunately, the existing memory module is not fully applicable to the anomaly detection task, and the reconstruction error of the anomaly samples remains small. Towards this end, this work proposes a new unsupervised visual anomaly detection method to jointly learn effective normal features and eliminate unfavorable reconstruction errors. Specifically, a novel Partition Memory Bank (PMB) module is proposed to effectively learn and store detailed features with semantic integrity of normal samples. It develops a new partition mechanism and a unique query generation method to preserve the context information and then improves the learning ability of the memory module. The proposed PMB and the skip connection are alternatively explored to make the reconstruction of abnormal samples worse. To obtain more precise anomaly localization results and solve the problem of cumulative reconstruction error, a novel Histogram Error Estimation module is proposed to adaptively eliminate the unfavorable errors by the histogram of the difference image. It improves the anomaly localization performance without increasing the cost. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method for anomaly detection and localization, extensive experiments are conducted on three widely-used anomaly detection datasets. The encouraging performance of the proposed method compared to the recent approaches based on the memory module demonstrates its superiority.