Author(s)

Hao Zhong, Shuai Kang, Ao Xiong

College of Railway Transportation, Hunan University of Technology, Zhuzhou, China.

Industrial appearance anomaly detection (AD) focuses on accurately identifying and locating abnormal regions in images. However, due to issues such as scarce abnormal samples, complex abnormal manifestations, and difficult abnormal annotation, the detection accuracy is limited. To solve these problems, based on the knowledge distillation framework, this paper proposes an unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm—Bidirectional knowledge distillation AD (BKD). This algorithm combines the advantages of forward and reverse distillation, enabling efficient anomaly detection. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art AD methods by 3% - 8% in AUC on the MVTec benchmarks.

Anomaly Detection, Knowledge Distillation, Unsupervised Learning

Zhong, H. , Kang, S. and Xiong, A. (2025) Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Algorithm Based on Bidirectional Knowledge Distillation Network. Open Journal of Applied Sciences, 15, 715-730. doi: 10.4236/ojapps.2025.153046.