U-Flow: A U-shaped Normalizing Flow for Anomaly Detection with Unsupervised Threshold

In this work we propose a non-contrastive method for anomaly detection and segmentation in images, that benefits both from a modern machine learning approach and a more classic statistical detection theory. The method consists of three phases. First, features are extracted by making use of a multi-scale image Transformer architecture. Then, these features are fed into a U-shaped Normalizing Flow that lays the theoretical foundations for the last phase, which computes a pixel-level anomaly map, and performs a segmentation based on the a contrario framework. This multiple hypothesis testing strategy permits to derive a robust automatic detection threshold, which is key in many real-world applications, where an operational point is needed. The segmentation results are evaluated using the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric, and for assessing the generated anomaly maps we report the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) at both image and pixel level. For both metrics, the proposed approach produces state-of-the-art results, ranking first in most MvTec-AD categories, with a mean pixel-level ROC- AUC of 98.74%. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/mtailanian/uflow.