Papers for

automated inspection system developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Logical anomaly detection remains robust under changes in image capture

Robust Logical Anomaly Detection under Capture Shifts via Synthetic Anomalies

Abstract: Detectors of logical anomalies, such as missing, extra or wrongly combined parts, usually score a test image by its distance from normal (good) images. They achieve near-perfect image-level AUROC on standard industrial anomaly detection benchmarks such as MVTec LOCO, but their robustness to changes in capture conditions remains largely unexamined. Under a heterogeneous perturbation protocol in which each test image is randomly kept unaltered or subjected to a brightness reduction or a zoom-out transformation, the normal-reference methods we tested lose 9.7 to 34.1 AUROC points, and two of the strongest, CSAD and SALAD, fall from 97.7% and 96.4% to 68.1% and 62.3%. We propose a framework in which a classifier, trained on normal images and on synthetic anomalies, scores a test image without comparing it with normal data. From a short description of each product, a language model derives anomaly types and editing instructions, an image editor applies them to normal images, and the classifier learns to separate the edited images from automatically discovered normal sub-modes. With its full training recipe, the framework reaches 94.9% AUROC on clean images, 1.5 to 2.8 points below SALAD and CSAD, and 94.1% under the perturbation protocol. Trained without brightness or zoom-out augmentation, so that neither test perturbation occurs in training, it still reaches 92.5% (93.2% clean). These results suggest that clean benchmark scores can hide a strong sensitivity to capture conditions, and that learning the decision from both normal images and rule violations may reduce it.

Tue 13 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
The gist
Detecting errors in items like missing or extra parts often relies on comparing new images to normal ones. The authors found that when lighting or zoom changes, popular methods become much less accurate. They developed a new approach that trains a system using normal examples and fake errors created by a language model and image editor. This method stays accurate even when images are darker or zoomed out, suggesting it can handle real-world variations better than previous techniques.
Open → 2610.18295v1

Self supervised method localizes any object in x ray scans

Localize Any Object in X-Ray Security Scans without Human Annotation

Abstract: Universal object localization in X-ray security inspection is critical for automated threat detection in safety-critical venues. However, unlike everyday RGB images that dominate web-scale visual data, X-ray scans exhibit distinct color patterns, ambiguous boundaries, and compositional structures caused by volumetric superposition. These gaps hinder the direct zero-shot transfer of dense perception foundation models trained on web-scale RGB data. Moreover, annotated X-ray data is scarce and requires expert labeling, limiting both the training of generalizable X-ray native models and the adaptation of RGB foundation models for X-ray data via fine-tuning. Given these challenges, the bright promise of highly generalizable perception models, enabled by data scaling laws in the RGB domain, remains largely out of reach for X-ray inspection. To this end, we introduce LAO-X, a self-supervised adaptation framework that Locates Any Object in X-ray scans using diverse synthesized image--annotation pairs with granularity-aware supervision. LAO-X first designs a saliency-guided X-ray object mining module to separate diverse object instances, which are then used for physics-guided synthesis in the absorbance domain. LAO-X further incorporates an occlusion-controlled curriculum strategy to fine-tune a Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) localizer, progressively adapting it to X-ray scans with increasing object counts and overlap levels. Experiments on six X-ray benchmarks show that LAO-X substantially improves category-agnostic localization, achieving 2\% to 23\% mAP gains over SAM2 and X-ray specific baselines in heavily cluttered scenarios, entirely without human-annotated labels.

Mon 5 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting objects in X-ray security images is hard because these images look very different from ordinary photos, and expert labels are rare. The authors developed a way to teach a model to find any object in these scans without needing human-labeled examples. They create synthetic training data by combining real image bits and use a step-by-step approach to handle more crowded and overlapping objects. Their method improved detection accuracy across several X-ray test sets, all without any human annotations.
Open → 2610.07326v1