Few-shot $\mathbf{1/a}$ Anomalies Feedback : Damage Vision Mining Opportunity and Embedding Feature Imbalance

TL;DR

This paper investigates anomaly detection in imbalanced visual datasets, proposing that a positive ratio of $1/a$ optimizes accuracy, with implications for damage vision mining in industrial and environmental contexts.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of an optimal positive ratio $1/a$ for anomaly detection accuracy in imbalanced datasets, highlighting its significance for damage vision mining applications.

Findings

Optimal positive ratio $1/a$ improves detection accuracy.

Extremely imbalanced data ($1/2a$) reduces accuracy.

Over-mining beyond $2/a$ does not enhance performance.

Abstract

Over the past decade, previous balanced datasets have been used to advance deep learning algorithms for industrial applications. In urban infrastructures and living environments, damage data mining cannot avoid imbalanced data issues because of rare unseen events and the high-quality status of improved operations. For visual inspection, the deteriorated class acquired from the surface of concrete and steel components are occasionally imbalanced. From numerous related surveys, we conclude that imbalanced data problems can be categorised into four types: 1) missing range of target and label valuables, 2) majority-minority class imbalance, 3) foreground background of spatial imbalance, and 4) long-tailed class of pixel-wise imbalance. Since 2015, many imbalanced studies have been conducted using deep-learning approaches, including regression, image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. However, anomaly detection for imbalanced data is not well known. In this study, we highlight a one-class anomaly detection application, whether anomalous class or not, and demonstrate clear examples of imbalanced vision datasets: medical disease, hazardous behaviour, material deterioration, plant disease, river sludge, and disaster damage. We provide key results on the advantage of damage-vision mining, hypothesising that the more effective the range of the positive ratio, the higher the accuracy gain of the anomalies feedback. In our imbalanced studies, compared with the balanced case with a positive ratio of $1/1$, we find that there is an applicable positive ratio $1/a$ where the accuracy is consistently high. However, the extremely imbalanced range is from one shot to $1/2a$, the accuracy of which is inferior to that of the applicable ratio. In contrast, with a positive ratio ranging over $2/a$, it shifts in the over-mining phase without an effective gain in accuracy.