Anomaly Detection using Score-based Perturbation Resilience

Unsupervised anomaly detection is widely studied in industrial applications where anomalous data is difficult to obtain. In particular, reconstruction-based anomaly detection can be a feasible solution if there is no option to use external knowledge, such as extra datasets or pre-trained models. However, reconstruction-based methods have limited utility due to poor detection performance. A score-based model, also known as a denoising diffusion model, recently has shown a high sample quality in the generation task. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised anomaly detection method leveraging the score-based model. The proposed method shows promising performance without requiring external knowledge. The score, a gradient of the log-likelihood, has a property that is available for anomaly detection. The samples on the data manifold can be restored instantly by the score, even if they are randomly perturbed. We call this score-based perturbation resilience. On the other hand, the samples that deviate from the manifold cannot be restored in the same way. The variation of resilience depending on the sample position can be an indicator to discriminate anomalies. We derive this statement from a geometric perspective. Our method shows superior performance on three benchmark datasets for industrial anomaly detection. Specifically, on MVTec AD, we achieve image-level AUROC of 97.7% and pixel-level AUROC of 97.4% outperforming previous works that do not use external knowledge.