Deep Subspace Learning for Surface Anomaly Classification Based on 3D Point Cloud Data

Surface anomaly classification is critical for manufacturing system fault diagnosis and quality control. However, the following challenges always hinder accurate anomaly classification in practice: (i) Anomaly patterns exhibit intra-class variation and inter-class similarity, presenting challenges in the accurate classification of each sample. (ii) Despite the predefined classes, new types of anomalies can occur during production that require to be detected accurately. (iii) Anomalous data is rare in manufacturing processes, leading to limited data for model learning. To tackle the above challenges simultaneously, this paper proposes a novel deep subspace learning-based 3D anomaly classification model. Specifically, starting from a lightweight encoder to extract the latent representations, we model each class as a subspace to account for the intra-class variation, while promoting distinct subspaces of different classes to tackle the inter-class similarity. Moreover, the explicit modeling of subspaces offers the capability to detect out-of-distribution samples, i.e., new types of anomalies, and the regularization effect with much fewer learnable parameters of our proposed subspace classifier, compared to the popular Multi-Layer Perceptions (MLPs). Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate our method achieves better anomaly classification results than benchmark methods, and can effectively identify the new types of anomalies.

Position: Untrained Machine Learning for Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection based on 3D point cloud data is an important research problem and receives more and more attention recently. Untrained anomaly detection based on only one sample is an emerging research problem motivated by real manufacturing industries such as personalized manufacturing that only one sample can be collected without any additional labels. How to accurately identify anomalies based on one 3D point cloud sample is a critical challenge in both industrial applications and the field of machine learning. This paper aims to provide a formal definition of untrained anomaly detection problem based on 3D point cloud data, discuss the differences between untrained anomaly detection and current unsupervised anomaly detection methods. Unlike unsupervised learning, untrained methods do not rely on any data, including unlabeled data. Instead, they leverage prior knowledge about the manufacturing surfaces and anomalies. Examples are used to illustrate these prior knowledge and untrained machine learning model. Afterwards, literature review on untrained anomaly detection based on 3D point cloud data is also provided, and the potential of untrained deep neural networks for anomaly detection is also discussed as outlooks.

Privacy-Preserving Federated Foundation Model for Generalist Ultrasound Artificial Intelligence

Ultrasound imaging is widely used in clinical diagnosis due to its non-invasive nature and real-time capabilities. However, conventional ultrasound diagnostics face several limitations, including high dependence on physician expertise and suboptimal image quality, which complicates interpretation and increases the likelihood of diagnostic errors. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance clinical diagnosis, particularly in detecting abnormalities across various biomedical imaging modalities. Nonetheless, current AI models for ultrasound imaging face critical challenges. First, these models often require large volumes of labeled medical data, raising concerns over patient privacy breaches. Second, most existing models are task-specific, which restricts their broader clinical utility. To overcome these challenges, we present UltraFedFM, an innovative privacy-preserving ultrasound foundation model. UltraFedFM is collaboratively pre-trained using federated learning across 16 distributed medical institutions in 9 countries, leveraging a dataset of over 1 million ultrasound images covering 19 organs and 10 ultrasound modalities. This extensive and diverse data, combined with a secure training framework, enables UltraFedFM to exhibit strong generalization and diagnostic capabilities. It achieves an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.927 for disease diagnosis and a dice similarity coefficient of 0.878 for lesion segmentation. Notably, UltraFedFM surpasses the diagnostic accuracy of mid-level ultrasonographers and matches the performance of expert-level sonographers in the joint diagnosis of 8 common systemic diseases. These findings indicate that UltraFedFM can significantly enhance clinical diagnostics while safeguarding patient privacy, marking an advancement in AI-driven ultrasound imaging for future clinical applications.

A Novel Representation of Periodic Pattern and Its Application to Untrained Anomaly Detection

There are a variety of industrial products that possess periodic textures or surfaces, such as carbon fiber textiles and display panels. Traditional image-based quality inspection methods for these products require identifying the periodic patterns from normal images (without anomaly and noise) and subsequently detecting anomaly pixels with inconsistent appearances. However, it remains challenging to accurately extract the periodic pattern from a single image in the presence of unknown anomalies and measurement noise. To deal with this challenge, this paper proposes a novel self-representation of the periodic image defined on a set of continuous parameters. In this way, periodic pattern learning can be embedded into a joint optimization framework, which is named periodic-sparse decomposition, with simultaneously modeling the sparse anomalies and Gaussian noise. Finally, for the real-world industrial images that may not strictly satisfy the periodic assumption, we propose a novel pixel-level anomaly scoring strategy to enhance the performance of anomaly detection. Both simulated and real-world case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology for periodic pattern learning and anomaly detection.

F2PAD: A General Optimization Framework for Feature-Level to Pixel-Level Anomaly Detection

Image-based inspection systems have been widely deployed in manufacturing production lines. Due to the scarcity of defective samples, unsupervised anomaly detection that only leverages normal samples during training to detect various defects is popular. Existing feature-based methods, utilizing deep features from pretrained neural networks, show their impressive performance in anomaly localization and the low demand for the sample size for training. However, the detected anomalous regions of these methods always exhibit inaccurate boundaries, which impedes the downstream tasks. This deficiency is caused: (i) The decreased resolution of high-level features compared with the original image, and (ii) The mixture of adjacent normal and anomalous pixels during feature extraction. To address them, we propose a novel unified optimization framework (F2PAD) that leverages the Feature-level information to guide the optimization process for Pixel-level Anomaly Detection in the inference stage. The proposed framework is universal and plug-and-play, which can enhance various feature-based methods with limited assumptions. Case studies are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy, particularly when applied to three popular backbone methods: PaDiM, CFLOW-AD, and PatchCore.

3D-CSAD: Untrained 3D Anomaly Detection for Complex Manufacturing Surfaces

The surface quality inspection of manufacturing parts based on 3D point cloud data has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The reason is that the 3D point cloud can capture the entire surface of manufacturing parts, unlike the previous practices that focus on some key product characteristics. However, achieving accurate 3D anomaly detection is challenging, due to the complex surfaces of manufacturing parts and the difficulty of collecting sufficient anomaly samples. To address these challenges, we propose a novel untrained anomaly detection method based on 3D point cloud data for complex manufacturing parts, which can achieve accurate anomaly detection in a single sample without training data. In the proposed framework, we transform an input sample into two sets of profiles along different directions. Based on one set of the profiles, a novel segmentation module is devised to segment the complex surface into multiple basic and simple components. In each component, another set of profiles, which have the nature of similar shapes, can be modeled as a low-rank matrix. Thus, accurate 3D anomaly detection can be achieved by using Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) on these low-rank matrices. Extensive numerical experiments on different types of parts show that our method achieves promising results compared with the benchmark methods.

MPOFI: Multichannel Partially Observed Functional Modeling for Defect Classification with Imbalanced Dataset via Deep Metric Learning

In modern manufacturing, most of the product lines are conforming. Few products are nonconforming but with different defect types. The identification of defect types can help further root cause diagnosis of production lines. With the sensing development, continuous signals of process variables can be collected in high resolution, which can be regarded as multichannel functional data. They have abundant information to characterize the process and help identify the defect types. Motivated by a real example from the pipe tightening process, we target at detect classification when each sample is a multichannel functional data. However, the available samples for each defect type are limited and imbalanced. Moreover, the functions are partially observed since the pre-tightening process before the pipe tightening process is unobserved. To classify the defect samples based on imbalanced, multichannel, and partially observed functional data is very important but challenging. Thus, we propose an innovative framework known as "Multichannel Partially Observed Functional Modeling for Defect Classification with an Imbalanced Dataset" (MPOFI). The framework leverages the power of deep metric learning in conjunction with a neural network specially crafted for processing functional data. This paper introduces a neural network explicitly tailored for handling multichannel and partially observed functional data, complemented by developing a corresponding loss function for training on imbalanced datasets. The results from a real-world case study demonstrate the superior accuracy of our framework when compared to existing benchmarks.

Tensor-based process control and monitoring for semiconductor manufacturing with unstable disturbances

With the development and popularity of sensors installed in manufacturing systems, complex data are collected during manufacturing processes, which brings challenges for traditional process control methods. This paper proposes a novel process control and monitoring method for the complex structure of high-dimensional image-based overlay errors (modeled in tensor form), which are collected in semiconductor manufacturing processes. The proposed method aims to reduce overlay errors using limited control recipes. We first build a high-dimensional process model and propose different tensor-on-vector regression algorithms to estimate parameters in the model to alleviate the curse of dimensionality. Then, based on the estimate of tensor parameters, the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) controller for tensor data is designed whose stability is theoretically guaranteed. Considering the fact that low-dimensional control recipes cannot compensate for all high-dimensional disturbances on the image, control residuals are monitored to prevent significant drifts of uncontrollable high-dimensional disturbances. Through extensive simulations and real case studies, the performances of parameter estimation algorithms and the EWMA controller in tensor space are evaluated. Compared with existing image-based feedback controllers, the superiority of our method is verified especially when disturbances are not stable.

Ano-SuPs: Multi-size anomaly detection for manufactured products by identifying suspected patches

Image-based systems have gained popularity owing to their capacity to provide rich manufacturing status information, low implementation costs and high acquisition rates. However, the complexity of the image background and various anomaly patterns pose new challenges to existing matrix decomposition methods, which are inadequate for modeling requirements. Moreover, the uncertainty of the anomaly can cause anomaly contamination problems, making the designed model and method highly susceptible to external disturbances. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage strategy anomaly detection method that detects anomalies by identifying suspected patches (Ano-SuPs). Specifically, we propose to detect the patches with anomalies by reconstructing the input image twice: the first step is to obtain a set of normal patches by removing those suspected patches, and the second step is to use those normal patches to refine the identification of the patches with anomalies. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we evaluate the proposed method systematically through simulation experiments and case studies. We further identified the key parameters and designed steps that impact the model's performance and efficiency.

MFRL-BI: Design of a Model-free Reinforcement Learning Process Control Scheme by Using Bayesian Inference

Design of process control scheme is critical for quality assurance to reduce variations in manufacturing systems. Taking semiconductor manufacturing as an example, extensive literature focuses on control optimization based on certain process models (usually linear models), which are obtained by experiments before a manufacturing process starts. However, in real applications, pre-defined models may not be accurate, especially for a complex manufacturing system. To tackle model inaccuracy, we propose a model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL) approach to conduct experiments and optimize control simultaneously according to real-time data. Specifically, we design a novel MFRL control scheme by updating the distribution of disturbances using Bayesian inference to reduce their large variations during manufacturing processes. As a result, the proposed MFRL controller is demonstrated to perform well in a nonlinear chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) process when the process model is unknown. Theoretical properties are also guaranteed when disturbances are additive. The numerical studies also demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methodology.