automotive inspection engineers

Abstract: Multi-class anomaly classification in industrial vision remains challenging due to noisy/incomplete anomaly representations and the unknown number of anomaly classes. To overcome this, we propose MACO, a novel multi-class anomaly classification framework that learns comprehensive representations and dynamically estimates class number without prior knowledge. First, a soft-focus attention uses anomaly maps to concentrate on relevant abnormal regions, while suppressing background noise. Second, auxiliary classification ([A-CLS]) tokens complement the [CLS] token. They collectively attend to diverse anomaly sub-regions, yielding more holistic and discriminative features. These [A-CLS] tokens are also effective across more tasks and domains. To infer the class number, we propose Correlation-based Number Estimation strategy. It computes the average correlation among labeled classes and transfers its separability cue to the unlabeled set. Experiments on MVTec AD and MTD datasets demonstrate our superiority. Under known class number, MACO improves ARI by 6.5% and $\textbf{16.3%}$ on both datasets, respectively. In the more challenging unknown number scenario, it achieves an $\textbf{11.2%}$ NMI gain on MTD and outperforms existing number estimation strategies by $\textbf{24.1%}$ UPS on MVTec AD. Code will be released at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/MACO.

Abstract: Automated crack inspection increasingly relies on deep learning, yet its reliability is limited by scarce and weakly controllable defect data. Existing generative augmentation methods often treat crack synthesis as a generic image-generation task, offering insufficient control over morphology, boundary fidelity, and scene context. This paper proposes an end-to-end automated pipeline for controllable crack data synthesis that formalizes crack geometry and inspection context into reusable computational constraints. First, procedurally sampled Bézier-curve skeletons are translated into realistic crack masks using a GAN, enabling scalable generation of diverse crack morphologies without manual mask design. Second, a dual-ControlNet diffusion framework disentangles appearance guidance from geometric guidance, with an edge-based branch enforcing strict boundary consistency. The framework supports both background-free synthesis and context-aware inpainting. Experiments on CRACK500 and CrackTree200 show consistent gains over existing augmentation baselines, demonstrating a scalable engineering informatics workflow for automated crack-inspection data generation.