Image-based process monitoring via adversarial autoencoder with applications to rolling defect detection

Image-based process monitoring has recently attracted increasing attention due to the advancement of the sensing technologies. However, existing process monitoring methods fail to fully utilize the spatial information of images due to their complex characteristics including the high-dimensionality and complex spatial structures. Recent advancements in unsupervised deep models such as generative adversarial networks (GAN) and adversarial autoencoders (AAE) has enabled to learn the complex spatial structures automatically. Inspired by this advancement, we propose an anomaly detection framework based on the AAE for unsupervised anomaly detection for images. AAE combines the power of GAN with the variational autoencoder, which serves as a nonlinear dimension reduction technique. Based on this, we propose a monitoring statistic efficiently capturing the change of the data. The performance of the proposed AAE-based anomaly detection algorithm is validated through a simulation study and real case study for rolling defect detection.