Latent Diffusion Based Multi-class Anomaly Detection

Chenxing Wang, Alireza Tavakkoli

Abstract: The unsupervised anomaly detection problem holds great importance but remains challenging to address due to the myriad of data possibilities in our daily lives. Currently, distinct models are trained for different scenarios. In this work, we introduce a reconstruction-based anomaly detection structure built on the Latent Space Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (LDM). This structure effectively detects anomalies in multi-class situations. When normal data comprises multiple object categories, existing reconstruction models often learn identical patterns. This leads to the successful reconstruction of both normal and anomalous data based on these patterns, resulting in the inability to distinguish anomalous data. To address this limitation, we implemented the LDM model. Its process of adding noise effectively disrupts identical patterns. Additionally, this advanced image generation model can generate images that deviate from the input. We have further proposed a classification model that compares the input with the reconstruction results, tapping into the generative power of the LDM model. Our structure has been tested on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, where it surpassed the performance of state-of-the-art reconstruction-based anomaly detection models.