PAEDID: Patch Autoencoder-based Deep Image Decomposition for pixel-level defective region segmentation

Unsupervised pixel-level defective region segmentation is an important task in image-based anomaly detection for various industrial applications. The state-of-the-art methods have their own advantages and limitations: matrix-decomposition-based methods are robust to noise, but lack complex background image modeling capability; representation-based methods are good at defective region localization, but lack accuracy in defective region shape contour extraction; reconstruction-based methods detected defective region match well with the ground truth defective region shape contour, but are noisy. To combine the best of both worlds, we present an unsupervised Patch AutoEncoder-based Deep Image Decomposition (PAEDID) method for defective region segmentation. In the training stage, we learn the common background as a deep image prior by a patch autoencoder network. In the inference stage, we formulate anomaly detection as an image decomposition problem with the deep image prior and sparsity regularizations. By adopting the proposed approach, the defective regions in the image can be accurately extracted in an unsupervised fashion. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the PAEDID method in simulation studies and an industrial dataset in the case study.