Verifying that manufactured batches of milling tools or carbide rotary burrs conform to production order sheets remains a largely manual and error-prone quality assurance task. Automating this process with computer vision faces a critical cold-start constraint since no labelled imagery is available, leaving manufacturer catalogue photography as the sole source of supervision. We investigate how far catalogue supervision can support an industrial recognition pipeline under domain shift, explicitly measuring the gap between catalogue separability and performance on held-out field photographs. Our findings reveal three key insights. First, off-the-shelf frozen feature extractors do not reliably separate the two task attributes, head shape and tooth profile, motivating targeted representation learning. Second, metric learning produces near-perfect unsupervised cluster discovery on catalogue images (adjusted Rand index 0.94--0.97), but less than half of this gain transfers to field photographs. Third, the largest transfer gains do not come from model scale or representation complexity, but from simple changes that reduce domain sensitivity: converting images to grayscale (+0.22) and constraining retrieval using the known order sheet via Hungarian assignment (+0.11). We therefore treat catalogue photography as a useful cold start rather than a deployment-ready training domain, and provide empirical baselines and an evaluation protocol for catalogue-to-field transfer in precision tool manufacturing.
Industrial inspection pipelines often restore a measured image before a detector acts on it, yet restoration can suppress detector-supported defect structure or create clean-region activations. We formulate restoration as a selective action problem over the measured display, five restored candidates, and review. SafeRestore ranks candidates with action-specific fitted scores, chooses a gate on threshold-tuning data, and evaluates the fixed gate on a disjoint certification sample with two one-sided exact binomial bounds: one for the positive-conditional evidence-loss incident rate and one for the all-accepted excess-activation incident rate. The guarantee is marginal for one policy fixed before its certification outcomes are observed, under an image-level i.i.d. working model. In a retrospective split-sample study of 4,591 public Carinthia-S images, the protocol yields auditable risk-coverage behavior. The primary all-action policy passes in one of five training repetitions (12.0% +/- 26.9% pass-gated test coverage when failures count as zero), whereas fixed bicubic and reduced-complexity variants pass more often. On reserved morphologies, evidence-loss incidence rises to 81.1-90.3%, and KolektorSDD lacks both detector competence and enough positive certification images for the stated target. The contribution is therefore an auditable, detector-relative framework for deciding when a transformed image may be returned automatically and when review remains necessary -- not a claim that adaptive routing outperforms simpler policies on the present evidence.
Recent years have witnessed growing interest in continual anomaly detection for industrial visual inspection. However, real-world manufacturing environments exhibit unpredictable shifts in data distributions, rendering task-dependent continual learning assumptions impractical. To address this limitation, we formulate industrial anomaly detection as a task-free continual learning problem and propose NC-TFAD, a neural-collapse-inspired, geometry-driven framework for learning from non-stationary data streams without task boundaries. NC-TFAD freezes a pretrained backbone and aligns streaming features to a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) prototype space to stabilize representation geometry under non-stationary streams. To satisfy the NC-inspired geometric construction in the absence of real anomalies, we generate synthetic anomaly samples as auxiliary anchors during training. Building on this geometry, we further introduce inter- and intra-class regularization together with a Focal Neural Collapse Contrastive (FNCC) loss to suppress representation drift and improve normal-anomaly separability. Finally, a normal-patch-prototype-guided localization branch constructs calibrated patch-wise deviation maps from normal training samples and fuses them with a weak self-attention prior, producing anomaly heatmaps without pixel-level annotations. Extensive experiments on MVTec AD and VisA show that NC-TFAD consistently outperforms representative task-free continual learning methods adapted from general vision, as well as unified anomaly detection baselines, in both image-level detection and pixel-level localization under the task-free continual learning protocol. These results highlight that geometry-driven modeling offers an effective and robust solution for task-free continual anomaly detection in real-world industrial applications.
Fine-grained defect severity grading is essential for industrial inspection, yet remains challenging due to the ordinal nature of severity labels, the strong dependence on morphology-related cues, and the train-test discrepancy between clean annotated instances and noisy predicted instances in two-stage pipelines. We propose MAOL, a Morphology-Aware Ordinal Learning framework for fine-grained industrial defect severity grading. MAOL formulates severity grading as an instance-level ordinal learning task, incorporates explicit morphological features to enhance representation learning, introduces class-conditional adaptive ordinal thresholds to model defect-specific grading boundaries, and employs prediction-aware training via localization perturbation to improve robustness to imperfect predicted instances. Extensive experiments under both clean-ROI and predicted-instance settings demonstrate that MAOL consistently outperforms rule-based methods, nominal classification models, and existing ordinal baselines, especially in the predicted-instance setting. The proposed approach ranked third in the IDA 2026 Challenge on Fine-Grained Severity Grading for High-Precision Manufacturing.
Hristo Valtchanov, Nicolas Piché, Vladimir Brailovski +3cs.CV
Non-destructive X-ray and computed tomography (CT) testing are essential for ensuring the dimensional accuracy of manufactured components with complex internal structures, such as the cooling channels in gas turbine blades, which directly affect thermal performance and service life. This study presents a multipart 3D-2D rigid registration approach for aligning CAD models with X-ray projections as an alternative to CT reconstruction for part inspection and measurement. A greedy registration algorithm sequentially aligns the blade's exterior before registering its internal components by maximizing the mutual information between simulated and acquired X-ray images. This stepwise approach reduces problem complexity and improves alignment accuracy. View angles are optimized using a greedy method that iteratively selects angles to minimize dimensional measurement errors. The results indicate that a small number of oblique views provides the best accuracy, although a broad range of angles yields acceptable results. The method achieves subpixel registration accuracy, with errors below one-fifth of the magnified detector-pixel pitch. Image noise and defects reduce registration precision, but direct registration in projection space mitigates these effects compared with CT reconstruction. Appropriate view selection can therefore preserve acceptable subpixel accuracy in the presence of image noise and defects.
Industrial anomaly detection is a critical component of modern manufacturing. Most traditional unsupervised methods rely on modelling normal feature distributions, inherently limiting generalization to unknown categories. To improve generalizability, some recent methods incorporate vision-language models (VLMs) for zero-shot detection via text prompts. However, we observe that reasoning-oriented post-training can cause anomaly discrimination to collapse, with some fine-tuned models performing worse than their base VLMs. Existing methods also provide only textual decisions or coarse boxes, without pixel-level segmentation. A more explicit detection principle comes from human inspection: anomalies are identified by comparing a query image with a defect-free reference. Inspired by this, we propose InspectorGPT, a VLM framework centered on comparative reasoning. Given a normal reference and a query image, InspectorGPT compares them to identify discrepancies and perform multiple inspection tasks with detailed reasoning. We internalize this capability through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with tailored, verifiable rewards. We further introduce InspectorGPT-Seg for pixel-level anomaly masks. Segmentation supervision improves anomaly discrimination but weakens semantic reasoning, while joint training fails to balance them. We therefore train the two branches separately and combine them through task-vector fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior multi-dimensional performance and generalization to unseen benchmarks, validating comparative reasoning for comprehensive industrial inspection.
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) has gained significant attention for its practical value in industrial inspection. Recently, CLIP-based approaches have been widely adopted in ZSAD due to their strong vision-language generalization capabilities. However, existing methods commonly employ continuous prompt embeddings for prompt optimization and encode semantics in latent vectors, which lack interpretability and scalability. To this end, we propose CoEvoAD, a co-evolutionary framework for discrete prompt selection. CoEvoAD performs prompt search in the discrete natural-language space using an evolutionary algorithm. Candidate prompts are iteratively generated, evaluated, and selected throughout population evolution, thus preserving the interpretability and composability of natural language. Furthermore, we introduce a Cross-Category Transfer Objective (CCTO), which treats held-out source categories as proxies for unseen categories and scores prompt rules based on their estimated cross-category transferability, effectively improving cross-category generalization. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of CoEvoAD, and the results show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple anomaly detection datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/rstao-bjtu/CoEvoAD.
Recent advances in anomaly detection (AD) for industrial inspection have pushed performance on standard benchmarks toward saturation. However, strong benchmark performance does not necessarily translate to real-world deployment, as these benchmarks are primarily collected under controlled acquisition conditions. Changes in illumination, background, viewpoint, and other environmental factors can shift normal samples away from the learned normal distribution and cause false anomaly responses. We address AD under such distribution shifts by explicitly modeling nuisance variation from changing imaging conditions in feature space. Without anomaly labels or target-domain data, our Nuisance-Filtered Anomaly Detection (NFAD) framework estimates a nuisance subspace from matched feature displacements induced by content-preserving perturbations and suppresses its contribution to anomaly residuals at inference. The same subspace supports two complementary branches: full projection for image-level detection and selective suppression for pixel-level localization, preserving evidence of localized defects. On AeBAD-S, a benchmark specifically designed for AD under acquisition shifts, NFAD achieves 91.0\% image-level AUROC, establishing a new state of the art. Notably, this robustness does not come at the expense of conventional AD performance: NFAD remains competitive on standard benchmarks that do not explicitly evaluate distribution shift, including VisA, Real-IAD, and MVTec AD. These results show that explicitly suppressing such nuisance variation improves AD under distribution shift while preserving strong performance in standard settings.
Elias Arbash, Andréa de Lima Ribeiro, Filipa Simões +9cs.CV cs.LG
The automated sorting of shredded black plastics from end-of-life (EOF) industrial waste presents a significant challenge in recycling facilities, primarily due to the limitations of current sensing and analytical approaches. Existing studies predominantly rely on single-point contact-based mid-infrared spectroscopy or laboratory hyperspectral imaging (HSI) setups, which fail to provide the spatially resolved analysis necessary for fast, bulk processing. Moreover, available datasets are laboratory-controlled and focus on intact rather than shredded plastics, hindering further recycling refinement. Black industrial plastics, in particular, are underrepresented, while most classification pipelines depend on manual region selection and rule-based spectral matching, neglecting spatial information and modern deep learning (DL) methods. To address these gaps, we introduce the first publicly available HSI dataset of shredded black plastics from EOF vehicle, comprising four industrial polymers across 13 co-registered RGB, VNIR, SWIR, and MWIR scenes and their segmentation pipeline. We developed a multi-modal spectral-spatial framework that integrates foreground isolation, pixel-wise classification, and object-level majority voting. By adapting advanced hyperspectral transformers from earth observation and incorporating chemometric band selection, we achieve accurate classification of complex black plastics. The study establishes the first comprehensive benchmark using nine processing methods, including chemometric, machine learning, and DL architectures. To ensure reproducibility, the complete dataset and methodologies are publicly released, establishing a benchmark for a hyperspectral object-analysis pipeline in industrial inspection.
Automated detection of surface micro-defects on industrial components, such as copper tubes, is critically important for quality assurance but remains challenging due to the minute scale of anomalies and their visual camouflage against complex backgrounds. These factors lead to weak feature representations and high rates of false positives and missed detections. To address these issues, we propose a novel real-time detection framework designed for efficient context perception and feature refinement. Our method integrates a Context-Perception Aggregation Module (CPAM), which synergises large-kernel perception for macro-texture context and small-kernel aggregation for sharp boundary delineation, effectively breaking the background camouflage. Furthermore, a Feature Additive Refinement Module (FARM) employs a linear-complexity additive token mixer to globally verify and refine the representation of fine-grained anomalies, suppressing noise-induced errors. To support research in this domain, we introduce the Copper Tube Defect Dataset (CTDD), a manually annotated benchmark containing 1,847 images and 4,898 boundingbox defect instances from copper-tube inspection scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our detector achieves strong and consistent performance on CTDD, outperforming representative baseline detectors, including YOLOv11, by 2.2% in mAP@50 and 3.9% in Precision while maintaining real-time inference speed. This work provides a robust and efficient solution for high-precision industrial inspection, bridging the gap between contextual understanding and detailed feature analysis. Our code and model are available at: https://github.com/Yu-Xinda/CFYOLO-Context-Aware-Feature-Refinement-for-Camouflaged-Industrial-Micro-Defect-Detection
Multi-view anomaly detection (MvAD) detects defects by exploiting complementary observations from multiple camera viewpoints. The central challenge is to fuse views with sufficient geometric awareness while remaining scalable to multi-class industrial settings. Existing methods typically fall into two extremes: voxel-based fusion provides explicit geometric alignment but requires costly 3D construction and class-specific assumptions, whereas lightweight patch-based fusion is efficient but relies on discrete candidate matching and lacks continuous cross-view correspondence. In this paper, we propose GeoMAD, a unified multi-view, multi-class AD framework that addresses both geometric correspondence deficiency and distributional inconsistency. Our \textit{Cross-view Deformable Fusion Module} (CDFM) learns content-adaptive, view-pair-specific sampling offsets directly on 2D feature maps and arranges them across a multi-scale window pyramid with image-global reference sampling, enabling hierarchical cross-view correspondence without camera calibration, voxel construction, or class-specific 3D supervision. We further introduce \textit{Distributional View Alignment} (DVA), a self-supervised cross-view regularization loss that aligns each view's bottleneck distribution against a per-instance view-centric target, enforcing global consistency without pixel-level correspondence. Together, CDFM and DVA bridge local geometric correspondence and global distributional consistency, providing geometry-aware and distribution-consistent fusion while preserving the efficiency of 2D feature-space learning. Extensive experiments on Real-IAD and MANTA-Tiny show that GeoMAD achieves strong detection and localization performance in unified MvAD.
Simone Garbin, Leonardo Venturoso, Marco Todescatocs.CV cs.AI
Visual inspection of welded assemblies remains one of the least automated stages in many industrial production processes, still depending largely on the experience of human operators and thus subject to inter-operator variability; the manufacturing of special-purpose machinery cabins, the setting of this study, is one representative case. This work evaluates the feasibility of automatic weld seam segmentation from RGB and polarimetric imagery, comparing controlled laboratory acquisitions with images captured under real, uncontrolled conditions. Convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and transformer-based architectures are benchmarked under a unified, threshold-independent protocol, training each CNN with three random seeds to separate genuine effects from seed noise. In controlled RGB conditions, CNN models reach a mean mask mAP50 of up to 0.87, but drop to 0.22-0.48 under uncontrolled acquisition, showing that the acquisition setup is a first-order component of the inspection system. Polarimetric imaging with alignment-preserving geometric augmentation localizes previously unseen welds with a mean mask mAP50 up to 0.93: on par with, rather than ahead of, the best controlled-RGB result, but reaching that accuracy on uncontrolled RGB without requiring acquisition control. The clearest architectural finding concerns viewpoint robustness. In-distribution, transformers and CNNs are broadly comparable; but under a test-time viewpoint shift, the transformer models, and RF-DETR in particular, retain high accuracy while every CNN collapses. The gap holds across three seeds and a resolution-matched control, pointing to architecture rather than training resolution. Within the CNN family, capacity brings no reliable in-distribution gain once seed variance is accounted for: small CNNs suffice for fixed viewpoints, transformers for variable ones.
Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) has recently benefited from vision-language models such as CLIP, which enable anomaly de?tection by aligning visual features with text descriptions of normal and abnormal states. However, existing methods typically rely on static text prompts that are applied uniformly across the entire feature hierarchy and spatial dimensions. This rigid global-to-local matching fails to capture the highly localized and scale-dependent physical variations of industrial defects. To address this, we propose DriftAD, a FSAD framework built on three key modules. First, an Anomaly Signal Amplification (ASA) module enhances subtle defect signals through spatial and frequency branches before text-visual matching. Second, Visually-Guided Text Drift (VGTD) dynamically transforms frozen CLIP text embeddings, steering them into layer?wise, spatially-adaptive anomaly descriptors conditioned on local visual context at each encoder depth. Third, Drift-Guided Spatial Gating (DGSG) uses the drifted abnormal descriptor as a spatial probe to selectively enhance anomaly-relevant visual features. Addi?tionally, a drift separation loss prevents representational collapse of the drifted descriptors, and a gate supervision loss enforces spatially discriminative gating in DGSG. Extensive experiments on MVTec?AD and VisA demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all 1-, 2-, and 4-shot settings on both image-level and pixel-level metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/wenyang001/DriftAD.
Patch-memory anomaly detectors assume that their reference bank is normal, an assumption that is difficult to guarantee when additional industrial images are unverified. We study whether a few trusted normal images can safely recover useful normal patches from such references without defect masks. Starting from the DINOv2 patch-memory formulation used by AnomalyDINO, we score candidate patches by distance to a clean seed bank, discard the most suspicious 20%, merge the retained patches with the seed, and enforce a fixed budget by greedy coreset selection. On Severstal, naive additional references contain 9.46% anomalous patches; the proposed trim rejects 78.1\% of them and reduces residual contamination to 2.59%. At an equal 51,200-patch development budget, the proposed bank reaches 0.1084 AUPRC versus 0.0950 for naive expansion, 0.0952 for random removal, and 0.1030 for eight clean images. Injecting only 0.5\% anomalous patches into a clean bank reduces AUPRC from 0.1030 to 0.0759. On all five completed held-out pairs, the proposed bank improves over naive expansion, with a mean gain of 0.0142 AUPRC. Reference purity is therefore a first-order design variable, and unverified images are useful only when their contribution is filtered explicitly.
Industrial visual inspection must both decide whether a product is defective and localize the defect, yet pixel-level masks are costly to collect at scale. Most anomaly-segmentation methods learn only from defect-free images and score deviations from normality. A true defect and an unusual-but-normal region, however, can both deviate substantially and receive similarly high scores. We propose Contrastive Dual Gaussian Processes (CDGP), a weakly supervised framework that models normal and anomaly inducing-variable predictive distributions over dense tokens. Its posterior-dominance statistic standardizes their predictive-mean difference by the joint predictive uncertainty, providing both spatial evidence and image-level confidence. This evidence complements hierarchical normal-reconstruction residuals for fine localization. All calibration uses training data only, without human pixel annotations or test-time fitting. Across MVTec AD~2, KSDD2, and VisA, CDGP ranks first among the evaluated methods on all MVTec AD~2 localization metrics and is first-place or competitive on KSDD2 and VisA. Factorized and matched linear-head controls delimit the contribution and scope of the linear-kernel Gaussian process (GP) formulation.
Industrial defect detection differs from natural-image object detection because inspection images are captured under controlled conditions and contain large normal-dominant regions with repetitive structures. Defects therefore appear as localized disruptions of otherwise predictable patterns, while conventional detectors rely mainly on sparse bounding-box supervision, resulting in weakly constrained normal-region representations. We propose a continuity-driven representation regularization framework that exploits normal-dominant regions as dense auxiliary supervision. The framework introduces two detector-agnostic objectives: Multi-Continuity Loss, which combines 1D patch-sequence prediction and 2D masked spatial prediction, and Differencing Loss, which regularizes first-order feature variation and second-order curvature between neighboring patch embeddings. Both objectives are applied with box-derived region weighting to stabilize normal-region representations while preserving defect-related discontinuities. Experiments on two real-world industrial datasets and the public NEU-DET benchmark, using six detector architectures including YOLO-family models, MambaYOLO, and DETR, demonstrate consistent improvements over native detector baselines. In the full-data setting, the proposed regularizers improve average mAP@0.5:0.95 by up to 3.49 percentage points on Industrial Metal, 5.38 percentage points on MEA, and 5.03 percentage points on NEU-DET. Under limited-data conditions, the gains become more pronounced, with Differencing Loss achieving improvements of up to 21.07 percentage points in mAP@0.5 and 8.23 percentage points in mAP@0.5:0.95 on NEU-DET using only 25% of the training data. These results suggest that continuity-driven regularization provides an effective prior for improving industrial defect detection, particularly when annotated data are scarce.
Studies of industrial visual inspection commonly report the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and the overlap between anomaly maps and defect masks. Neither measure specifies the false-alarm rate at a selected threshold, while recurrent defect locations and mask geometry can inflate overlap. We combine a distribution-free upper tolerance threshold with a paired-minus-crossed spatial test. This test compares each detector's score-contributing locations with the matched defect mask and with masks from other images; the difference in rates defines spatial-evidence lift relative to the empirical chance-overlap rate. We evaluate three detectors on 120 point-defect images from three ISP-AD modalities and three fixed data splits. Of 378 alarms, 230 overlap the matched mask. Paired and crossed rates are nevertheless similar in eight of nine detector--modality cells; only DINOv2--ASM has a positive 95\% bootstrap lower bound (lift 0.259, 95\% interval 0.159--0.347). On the independent Magnetic Tile Defect dataset, the same analysis gives lifts of 0.203 (0.169--0.236) for Wide ResNet-50 (WRN50) patch memory and 0.231 (0.202--0.262) for Vision Transformer B/16 (ViT-B/16) patch memory, with one-sided permutation $p=10^{-5}$ for both. When crossed masks are restricted to the same defect class, the lifts remain 0.185 and 0.210. Exact sample planning shows that, with 150 calibration normals, a 95\%-confidence distribution-free claim is supported only for target false-positive rates of 1.98\% or higher; a 1\% target requires at least 299 normals. The results support reporting operating-point performance and chance-corrected spatial evidence alongside AUROC and raw mask overlap.
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to identify anomalies in unseen domains, a setting that is particularly critical for industrial and medical applications where domain shifts are prevalent. However, most CLIP-based ZSAD methods anchor semantics solely on the text modality, making performance highly sensitive to prompt design and leading to weak visual grounding. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a Dual-Anchor framework that complements conventional text anchors with hierarchical image anchors constructed via a top-down grouping mechanism. This mechanism progressively aggregates local-to-global image features to form normal and abnormal group tokens, which serve as image anchors and act as gating signals in a Group-Gated Token Refiner to enhance the global representation. The refined image anchors are then fused with text prompts to construct dynamic state prompts. By jointly reinforcing visual and textual semantics, our framework stabilizes image-text alignment, reduces prompt dependency, and achieves strong generalization across 8 industrial and 6 medical benchmarks.
Francisco Guillén, Ricardo Almeida, Bruno Silva +1cs.CV
CableDex is a computer vision system that addresses the time-consuming and inaccurate manual measurement of cable length on industrial reels from a single photograph captured with a mobile phone. The system combines camera calibration, instance segmentation, pose estimation, and volumetric calculation to estimate the cable length across five different reel types and various cable sizes. This system is based on an instance segmentation model trained on 1,000 manually annotated images, achieving 99.5\% mAP50 with an inference time of 5.66 ms per image. Evaluated on 75 reels across five reel types, the system achieves a MAPE of 4.90\%, within the 10\% error tolerance commonly accepted in industrial cable-reel measurement. The demonstration presents the end-to-end pipeline, from reel label scanning and image capture to segmentation and length estimation, through the mobile application.
This paper presents RobustDefect-LLM, an industrial surface-defect inspection framework integrating deep-learning classification, operator-facing visual evidence, confidence-aware decision support, controlled AI-assisted reporting, traceable storage, and mobile interaction in a unified quality-control workflow. Here, robustness-aware denotes explicit evaluation under controlled image degradation and confidence-aware review routing, not an intrinsic robustness guarantee. Four transfer-learning-based convolutional neural networks, ResNet50, EfficientNet-B0, DenseNet121, and MobileNetV3-Large, were evaluated on 1,799 images from the six-class NEU-DET dataset using fixed training, validation, and held-out in-domain test partitions. MobileNetV3-Large achieved the highest numerical test accuracy (99.26%) and macro F1-score (0.9926), with a bootstrap 95% accuracy CI of 0.9815-1.0000. An exact paired McNemar test found no significant difference from DenseNet121 (p = 1.000). The selected model averaged 0.060 s per CPU forward pass (16.66 FPS). Under combined synthetic degradation, accuracy fell to 87.78% at mild intensity and below 40% at stronger intensities, revealing sensitivity to severe image-quality deterioration. Grad-CAM supplied visual evidence, while predictions with confidence below 0.90 or a top-2 margin below 0.10 were routed to HUMAN REVIEW. This conservative policy provided 12.22% automatic coverage and 100% observed selective accuracy among 33 eligible cases (95% CI: 89.43%-100.00%), while routing both observed classification errors to review. Under nominal controlled conditions, all 100 generated reports passed deterministic consistency checks, with a mean latency of 1.66 s. Results support the feasibility of the integrated workflow while emphasizing the need for calibration, repeated evaluation, and real-world industrial validation.
Industrial anomaly inspection is severely hindered by the scarcity of real anomalous data. Zero-shot industrial anomaly generation addresses this by generating anomalies on specific products without requiring any of their real anomalous images. However, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations, i.e., inaccurate anomaly information acquisition and uncontrolled anomaly-product fusion. To overcome these challenges, we propose DeCo, which decouples the anomaly structure from its source product, and explicitly recouples it with the normal textures of the target product. During anomaly information acquisition, Dual-Routing Flow (DR-Flow) binds the texture-invariant anomaly structure to an abnormal token, while a parallel constraint, Product-Invariant Flow (PI-Flow), prevents the abnormal token from binding the source product. During anomaly-product fusion, we propose a hybrid injection to recouple the acquired anomaly structure with the target product, and Product Compatibility Correction (PCC) to compensate for the incompatibility between the acquired anomaly structure and the product. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeCo establishes a new state-of-the-art. Training downstream detection models on our generated data yields massive pixel AP improvements of 5.1% on MVTec AD and 8.2% on VisA. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/DeCo.
Industrial anomaly inspection faces a major challenge due to the lack of real-world anomaly samples. While generative models are used to create anomaly data, existing methods still struggle when handling small-scale anomalies. This failure occurs because extreme downsampling in diffusion models causes the information of small anomalies to be lost in the latent space. To address this, we introduce UniScale, a unified training and inference framework for high-fidelity industrial anomaly generation across arbitrary scales. During training, we introduce an Error-Suppressed Multi-Scale Training (EMT) strategy, which enables the model to learn the rich location-aware textures of anomalies, while suppressing upsampling-induced interpolation errors in texture acquisition, ensuring the model is capable of learning small-scale anomalies, while remaining effective for regular scale anomalies. For inference, we propose Generation-then-Fusion Denoising. It decouples anomaly generation from background integration, preventing small anomalies from being overwhelmed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in both anomaly generation quality and downstream detection performance. It achieves a relative IS(a) improvement of 45.86% (from 1.81 to 2.64) on VisA and 37.70% (from 1.22 to 1.68) on MVTec AD 2, while also improving the downstream pixel-level IoU by 4.22% on VisA and AUROC by 6.55% on MVTec AD 2. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/UniScale.
Few-shot industrial anomaly detection (FS-IAD) focuses on detecting and localizing visual defects in industrial inspection during the cold-start phase, where only a limited number of normal training samples are available per category. Recent advances in this field predominantly leverage visual features from foundation-model and have achieved promising performance. Despite the strong representational power of foundation-model features, the model generalization remains fragile due to the extreme scarcity of normal training data.To address this pivotal issue, we propose ConceptADapt, a concept-guided adaptive feature reconstruction model with dynamic attention. Specifically, our model pre-learns a set of fixed normal concepts from the limited support features and leverages them to mine relationships with query features, thereby recalibrating their statistics for improved anomaly detection at test time. To mitigate the prevalent feature shortcut problem, which is particularly severe under low-data regimes, we further develop a dynamic attention mechanism integrated with sparse autoencoders to learn robust normal concepts during training. Moreover, to enable fast adaptation during inference, our model remains lightweight by incorporating LoRA into the attention module, which introduces only minimal updating parameters.Extensive experiments on three widely adopted FS-IAD benchmarks, including MVTec-AD, VisA, and MPDD, demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches across both detection and localization tasks, achieving significant improvements under various shot settings.
Multimodal large language models have demonstrated strong defect recognition capability in industrial anomaly detection. However, in lithography review, merely determining whether an image contains a defect is insufficient for engineering inspection; models must also understand defect morphology, spatial location, and the potential causes supported by visible evidence. To this end, this paper proposes LDU-Bench, a multi-task multimodal benchmark for lithography defect understanding. Constructed from real lithography and integrated-circuit review images, LDU-Bench decomposes the review workflow into four independent tasks: defect triage, morphology recognition, coarse localization, and image-conditioned cause analysis. It systematically evaluates models using task-level metrics, diagnostic readouts, and the Lithography Closure Score (LCS). Experimental results show that although existing MLLMs can perform defect triage relatively reliably, this ability does not stably transfer to downstream review stages. Morphology alignment, effective localization, and evidence-to-cause mapping remain the major bottlenecks. Further diagnostics indicate that this capability break is not a fluctuation of a single metric, but reflects insufficient structured understanding across semantic levels. Overall, LDU-Bench provides a quantifiable and diagnostic unified platform for evaluating the usability, failure points, and capability boundaries of industrial MLLMs in lithography review chains.
Industrial anomaly detection and localization are limited by scarce real anomalies and pixel-level annotations, a bottleneck that synthetic image-mask pairs can alleviate. However, existing few-shot mask-guided generation may over-follow mask geometry, produce weak anomalies, or use condition masks incompatible with the current object instance. We propose OSAGEN, which combines object-aware mask priors with multistage decoupled diffusion. Its three-stage adaptation sequentially learns normal appearance, defect appearance under coarse conditions, and fine-grained mask calibration, improving defect realization and local control. QBG injects object structure from a matched normal image into mask diffusion to produce object-aware priors, while ISC restricts anomaly propagation and preserves normal content during sampling. A lightweight materialization step recovers pixel-level labels aligned with the realized defects. On MVTec AD and VisA, OSAGEN achieves AP-P/F1-P scores of 88.1/82.2 and 68.5/66.1, respectively, under a unified downstream localization protocol. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Long-horizon steel-equipment inspection requires reasoning over heterogeneous records accumulated across repeated inspection cycles. Existing retrieval-augmented generation systems treat historical logs as a static corpus and retain records without estimating their diagnostic value, failing to report early risk. To this end, we propose ConMem, a contribution-aware memory framework for LLM-assisted equipment inspection, supporting a human-in-the-loop early-risk screening system. Specifically, our ConMem first segments inspection logs into functional evidence units, then estimates each memory unit's contribution to downstream diagnosis through a Shapley-style estimation, and finally retains high-value evidence under a constrained memory budget. In experiments, we evaluate ConMem on real-world dataset and ConMem achieves 76.0% QA accuracy, exceeding the strongest directly comparable baseline. Relative to the naive 8K-context LLM baselines, it reduces the average number of input tokens by 88.2% and response time by 86.6%. Ablation studies also show that the functional-role-aware segmentation and contribution-based valuation are helping prioritize weak degradation signals for targeted field inspection. Practical deployments further confirm that ConMem retains the weak early signal across three inspection cycles, providing an early-stage seal-wear alert targeted for on-site inspectors.
Paul Julius Kühn, Saptarshi Neil Sinha, Tiago Kleist +3cs.CV cs.AI
While automated defect detection such as the detection of surface scratched is an important aspect in industrial quality control, the scarcity of annotated defect data make this task challenging. This paper presents a procedural rendering pipeline that generates large-scale annotated synthetic training data using BlenderProc, with configurable material appearance, camera modes, and domain randomization, producing automatic COCO-format annotations. To show the potential of our approach, we evaluate four training strategies, namely synthetic-only, real-only, mixed, and fine-tuning from synthetic weights, across two objects with different material properties and three lightweight edge-deployable detectors, YOLOX, YOLO26, and LW-DETR. Our evaluation show that fine-tuning from synthetic weights consistently outperforms real-only training, and that mixed training effectively recovers performance under scarce real-data conditions, with findings validated across both convolutional and transformer-based architectures. The proposed approach enables scalable defect detection without the burden of large real annotated datasets, making it practical for on-device industrial inspection. The pipeline scripts for generating synthetic scratches, 3D model, and both the synthetic and real annotated scratch datasets for a glossy toy Ferrari car are publicly available at https://github.com/saptarshineil/ScratchSim.
Quality control in printing, particularly in rotogravure printing, still depends on slow, costly, and subjective manual inspection. Automated surface defect detection is critical for maintaining high-quality standards in rotogravure printing. Deep learning models give prospects for automation. However, training robust deep learning models, such as YOLO or Vision Transformers, is heavily hindered by the extreme scarcity of real-world industrial defects images. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel synthetic data generation framework tailored for rotogravure printing quality control. The proposed pipeline automatically generates high-fidelity images of specific printing defects (creases, streaks, misregistration, etc.) and outputs corresponding bounding boxes and annotations. To validate the framework, a synthetic dataset of 7533 images was generated and used to train the state-of-the-art object-detection model RFDETR. Experimental results demonstrate that the model trained on our synthetic data achieves a Mean Average Precision (mAP) of 80.9\% on real industrial testing samples. This framework provides a zero-cost, rapid-deployment solution for automating defect inspection in printing lines without requiring massive manual data collection.
Zhongming Liu, Bingbing Jiang, Guangxin Wan +1cs.CV
Steel surface defect segmentation is critical for industrial quality inspection, yet existing methods struggle with elongated, anisotropic defects such as cracks and scratches due to the isotropic receptive fields of standard convolutions and rigid sampling grids that cannot adapt to irregular defect boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose Strip-based Predictor for Deformable Convolutional Networks (SPDCN) with two key innovations. The \textbf{Fuzzy-enhanced Multi-scale Context Module (FMCM)} employs group-wise multi-branch convolutions with an intuitionistic fuzzy channel attention mechanism to adaptively capture multi-scale contextual information across varying defect sizes. The \textbf{Adaptive Direction-Aware Deformable Convolution (ADADC)} replaces the conventional offset predictor with decoupled horizontal and vertical strip convolutions, enabling the deformable sampling grid to anisotropically align with the principal orientation of elongated defects. Extensive experiments on public steel surface defect benchmarks demonstrate that SPDCN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 89.60\% mIoU on NEU-Seg with only 3.54M parameters. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/DWlzm .
Existing Multi-view Anomaly Detection (MAD) methods assume that all views are completely available and model each view separately. However, in real industrial scenarios, information in the view may be missing due to faults such as occlusion, which leads to the performance degradation of existing methods due to the lack of a multi-view consistency prior. To address this, we explored a more challenging task: Incomplete Multi-View Anomaly Detection (IMVAD), in which some areas of each view were masked. We proposed a pipeline for automatically generating the IMVAD dataset and generated the \textbf{RIMAD} dataset based on the Real-IAD dataset through this pipeline. In addition, in order to effectively utilize the information of multiple views in the absence of view information, we propose \textbf{IMMoE}, which consists of two key modules: (1) Multi-View Expert Fusion (MVEF) effectively fuses multi-view information through a multi-view expert network and guides the reconstruction of a single view; (2) Local Anomaly Enhancement Encoder (LAEE) effectively prevents the model from overfitting the mask region by applying dropout to local features. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the RIMAD and Real-IAD datasets, especially on RIMAD, we have increased the pixel-level and image-level metrics by 11.8\% and 2.8\%, respectively. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HULEI7/IMMoE