Few-Shot Defect Segmentation Leveraging Abundant Normal Training Samples Through Normal Background Regularization and Crop-and-Paste Operation

In industrial product quality assessment, it is essential to determine whether a product is defect-free and further analyze the severity of anomality. To this end, accurate defect segmentation on images of products provides an important functionality. In industrial inspection tasks, it is common to capture abundant defect-free image samples but very limited anomalous ones. Therefore, it is critical to develop automatic and accurate defect segmentation systems using only a small number of annotated anomalous training images. This paper tackles the challenging few-shot defect segmentation task with sufficient normal (defect-free) training images but very few anomalous ones. We present two effective regularization techniques via incorporating abundant defect-free images into the training of a UNet-like encoder-decoder defect segmentation network. We first propose a Normal Background Regularization (NBR) loss which is jointly minimized with the segmentation loss, enhancing the encoder network to produce distinctive representations for normal regions. Secondly, we crop/paste defective regions to the randomly selected normal images for data augmentation and propose a weighted binary cross-entropy loss to enhance the training by emphasizing more realistic crop-and-pasted augmented images based on feature-level similarity comparison. Both techniques are implemented on an encoder-decoder segmentation network backboned by ResNet-34 for few-shot defect segmentation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the recently released MVTec Anomaly Detection dataset with high-resolution industrial images. Under both 1-shot and 5-shot defect segmentation settings, the proposed method significantly outperforms several benchmarking methods.