Context Enhancement with Reconstruction as Sequence for Unified Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces RAS, a novel sequence-based reconstruction method using transformers to improve contextual awareness in unsupervised anomaly detection, achieving superior performance in a unified class setting.

Contribution

The paper proposes RAS, a new reconstruction approach with transformer-based sequence modeling, enhancing contextual understanding for anomaly detection.

Findings

RAS outperforms existing methods in experiments.

Increased contextual awareness improves detection accuracy.

Transformer-based reconstruction enhances spatial relationship modeling.

Abstract

Unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) aims to train robust detection models using only normal samples, while can generalize well to unseen anomalies. Recent research focuses on a unified unsupervised AD setting in which only one model is trained for all classes, i.e., n-class-one-model paradigm. Feature-reconstruction-based methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in this scenario. However, existing methods often suffer from a lack of sufficient contextual awareness, thereby compromising the quality of the reconstruction. To address this issue, we introduce a novel Reconstruction as Sequence (RAS) method, which enhances the contextual correspondence during feature reconstruction from a sequence modeling perspective. In particular, based on the transformer technique, we integrate a specialized RASFormer block into RAS. This block enables the capture of spatial relationships among different image regions and enhances sequential dependencies throughout the reconstruction process. By incorporating the RASFormer block, our RAS method achieves superior contextual awareness capabilities, leading to remarkable performance. Experimental results show that our RAS significantly outperforms competing methods, well demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nothingtolose9979/RAS.