Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a challenging task and usually formulated as an unsupervised learning problem for the unexpectedness of anomalies. This paper proposes a simple yet powerful approach to this issue, which is implemented in the student-teacher framework for its advantages but substantially extends it in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Given a strong model pre-trained on image classification as the teacher, we distill the knowledge into a single student network with the identical architecture to learn the distribution of anomaly-free images and this one-step transfer preserves the crucial clues as much as possible. Moreover, we integrate the multi-scale feature matching strategy into the framework, and this hierarchical feature alignment enables the student network to receive a mixture of multi-level knowledge from the feature pyramid under better supervision, thus allowing to detect anomalies of various sizes. The difference between feature pyramids generated by the two networks serves as a scoring function indicating the probability of anomaly occurring. Due to such operations, our approach achieves accurate and fast pixel-level anomaly detection. Very competitive results are delivered on three major benchmarks, significantly superior to the state of the art ones. In addition, it makes inferences at a very high speed (with 100 FPS for images of the size at 256x256), at least dozens of times faster than the latest counterparts.