Attentive Autoencoders For Improving Visual Anomaly Detection

Understanding the notion of normality in visual data is a complex issue in computer vision with plenty of potential applications in several sectors. The immense effort required for optimal design for real-world application of existing methods warrants the need for a generic framework that is efficient, automated and can be momentarily deployed for the operation, reducing the effort expended on model design and hyper-parameter tuning. Hence, we propose a novel, modular and model-agnostic improvement to the conventional AutoEncoder architecture, based on visual soft-attention for the inputs to make them robust and readily improve their performance in automated semi-supervised visual anomaly detection tasks, without any extra effort in terms of hyperparameter tuning. Besides, we discuss the role of attention in AutoEncoders (AE) that can significantly improve learning and the efficacy of the models with detailed experimental results on diverse visual anomaly detection datasets.