Subspace-Guided Feature Reconstruction for Unsupervised Anomaly Localization

Unsupervised anomaly localization, which plays a critical role in industrial manufacturing, aims to identify anomalous regions that deviate from normal sample patterns. Most recent methods perform feature matching or reconstruction for the target sample with pre-trained deep neural networks. However, they still struggle to address challenging anomalies because the deep embeddings stored in the memory bank can be less powerful and informative. More specifically, prior methods often overly rely on the finite resources stored in the memory bank, which leads to low robustness to unseen targets. In this paper, we propose a novel subspace-guided feature reconstruction framework to pursue adaptive feature approximation for anomaly localization. It first learns to construct low-dimensional subspaces from the given nominal samples, and then learns to reconstruct the given deep target embedding by linearly combining the subspace basis vectors using the self-expressive model. Our core is that, despite the limited resources in the memory bank, the out-of-bank features can be alternatively ``mimicked'' under the self-expressive mechanism to adaptively model the target. Eventually, the poorly reconstructed feature dimensions indicate anomalies for localization. Moreover, we propose a sampling method that leverages the sparsity of subspaces and allows the feature reconstruction to depend only on a small resource subset, which contributes to less memory overhead. Extensive experiments on three industrial benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach generally achieves state-of-the-art anomaly localization performance.