Dual model knowledge distillation for industrial anomaly detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection holds significant importance in large-scale industrial manufacturing. Recent methods have capitalized on the benefits of employing a classifier pretrained on natural images to extract representative features from specific layers, which are subsequently processed using various techniques. Notably, memory bank-based methods, which have demonstrated exceptional accuracy, often incur a trade-off in terms of latency, posing a challenge in real-time industrial applications where prompt anomaly detection and response are crucial. Indeed, alternative approaches such as knowledge distillation and normalized flow have demonstrated promising performance in unsupervised anomaly detection while maintaining low latency. In this paper, we aim to revisit the concept of knowledge distillation in the context of unsupervised anomaly detection, emphasizing the significance of feature selection. By employing distinctive features and leveraging different models, we intend to highlight the importance of carefully selecting and utilizing relevant features specifically tailored for the task of anomaly detection. This article presents a novel approach for anomaly detection, which employs dual model knowledge distillation and incorporates various types of semantic information by leveraging high and low-level semantic information.