Geometry-Aligned and Anomaly-Aware Reconstruction for 3D Anomaly Detection

Point cloud anomaly detection is crucial in automated manufacturing, with reconstruction-based diffusion methods emerging as a mainstream solution. However, these approaches still face two major challenges: (1) geometry violation, where random noise perturbations deviate from local surface normals, causing structural distortion; and (2) undistinguished reference regions, where uniformly applied coarse anomaly embeddings during denoising blur normal details and impede accurate anomaly recovery. To address these issues, we propose AARD, a geometry-aligned and anomaly-aware diffusion reconstruction framework. We argue that high-fidelity anomaly detection requires a principled reformulation of the diffusion process: noise should align with geometry to preserve structures, and reconstruction can be better guided by anomaly-aware references to discriminatively recover normal details while correcting defects. AARD progressively aligns noise directions with vertex normals while maintaining vertex-graph consistency, and employs an adaptive transformer that assigns normal references to anomalous regions and input references to normal areas. Experiments on Anomaly-ShapeNet and Real3D-AD show that AARD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving superior geometric fidelity and robust anomaly localization.