Memory Efficient Continual Learning for Edge-Based Visual Anomaly Detection

Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) is a critical task in computer vision with numerous real-world applications. However, deploying these models on edge devices presents significant challenges, such as constrained computational and memory resources. Additionally, dynamic data distributions in real-world settings necessitate continuous model adaptation, further complicating deployment under limited resources. To address these challenges, we present a novel investigation into the problem of Continual Learning for Visual Anomaly Detection (CLAD) on edge devices. We evaluate the STFPM approach, given its low memory footprint on edge devices, which demonstrates good performance when combined with the Replay approach. Furthermore, we propose to study the behavior of a recently proposed approach, PaSTe, specifically designed for the edge but not yet explored in the Continual Learning context. Our results show that PaSTe is not only a lighter version of STPFM, but it also achieves superior anomaly detection performance, improving the f1 pixel performance by 10% with the Replay technique. In particular, the structure of PaSTe allows us to test it using a series of Compressed Replay techniques, reducing memory overhead by a maximum of 91.5% compared to the traditional Replay for STFPM. Our study proves the feasibility of deploying VAD models that adapt and learn incrementally on CLAD scenarios on resource-constrained edge devices.

From Vision to Sound: Advancing Audio Anomaly Detection with Vision-Based Algorithms

Recent advances in Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) have introduced sophisticated algorithms leveraging embeddings generated by pre-trained feature extractors. Inspired by these developments, we investigate the adaptation of such algorithms to the audio domain to address the problem of Audio Anomaly Detection (AAD). Unlike most existing AAD methods, which primarily classify anomalous samples, our approach introduces fine-grained temporal-frequency localization of anomalies within the spectrogram, significantly improving explainability. This capability enables a more precise understanding of where and when anomalies occur, making the results more actionable for end users. We evaluate our approach on industrial and environmental benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of VAD techniques in detecting anomalies in audio signals. Moreover, they improve explainability by enabling localized anomaly identification, making audio anomaly detection systems more interpretable and practical.

PaSTe: Improving the Efficiency of Visual Anomaly Detection at the Edge

Visual Anomaly Detection (VAD) has gained significant research attention for its ability to identify anomalous images and pinpoint the specific areas responsible for the anomaly. A key advantage of VAD is its unsupervised nature, which eliminates the need for costly and time-consuming labeled data collection. However, despite its potential for real-world applications, the literature has given limited focus to resource-efficient VAD, particularly for deployment on edge devices. This work addresses this gap by leveraging lightweight neural networks to reduce memory and computation requirements, enabling VAD deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. We benchmark the major VAD algorithms within this framework and demonstrate the feasibility of edge-based VAD using the well-known MVTec dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a novel algorithm, Partially Shared Teacher-student (PaSTe), designed to address the high resource demands of the existing Student Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching (STFPM) approach. Our results show that PaSTe decreases the inference time by 25%, while reducing the training time by 33% and peak RAM usage during training by 76%. These improvements make the VAD process significantly more efficient, laying a solid foundation for real-world deployment on edge devices.

Unveiling the Anomalies in an Ever-Changing World: A Benchmark for Pixel-Level Anomaly Detection in Continual Learning

Anomaly Detection is a relevant problem in numerous real-world applications, especially when dealing with images. However, little attention has been paid to the issue of changes over time in the input data distribution, which may cause a significant decrease in performance. In this study, we investigate the problem of Pixel-Level Anomaly Detection in the Continual Learning setting, where new data arrives over time and the goal is to perform well on new and old data. We implement several state-of-the-art techniques to solve the Anomaly Detection problem in the classic setting and adapt them to work in the Continual Learning setting. To validate the approaches, we use a real-world dataset of images with pixel-based anomalies to provide a reliable benchmark and serve as a foundation for further advancements in the field. We provide a comprehensive analysis, discussing which Anomaly Detection methods and which families of approaches seem more suitable for the Continual Learning setting.