P2 random walk: self-supervised anomaly detection with pixel-point random walk

Abstract In the domain of intelligent manufacturing, automatic anomaly detection plays a pivotal role and holds great significance for improving production efficiency and product quality. However, the scarcity and uncertainty of anomalous data pose significant challenges in this field. Data augmentation methods, such as Cutout, which are widely adopted in existing methodologies, tend to generate patterned data, leading to biased data and compromised detection performance. To deal with this issue, we propose an approach termed self-supervised anomaly detection with pixel-point random walk (P2 Random Walk), which combines data augmentation and Siamese neural networks. We develop a pixel-level data augmentation technique to enhance the randomness of generated data and establish a two-stage anomaly classification framework. The effectiveness of the P2 Random Walk method has been demonstrated on the MVTec dataset, achieving an AUROC of 96.2% and 96.3% for classification and segmentation, respectively, by using only data augmentation-based techniques. Specifically, our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in several categories, improving the AUROC for classification and segmentation by 0.5% and 0.3%, respectively, which demonstrates the high performance and strong academic value of our method in anomaly detection tasks.