Industrial anomaly detection has attracted significant attention as a fundamental challenge in industrial systems. The rapid advancement of heterogeneous industrial sensors has driven industrial anomaly detection from unimodal to multimodal paradigms. However, existing methods are primarily designed for centralized and offline settings, overlooking the distributed and continuously generated data characteristic of real-world industrial environments. With the advancement of edge intelligence, modern edge devices are increasingly capable of not only data acquisition but also distributed model training, enabling collaborative intelligence across the system. Industrial anomaly detection represents a critical application in this context. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed Multimodal Online Distributed Industrial Anomaly Detection (MODIAD). We first present a comprehensive workflow for MODIAD and then formulate a Multi-class Intelligent Scheduling (MIS) problem to coordinate cross class model updates by balancing data sufficiency and class update frequency. To efficiently solve this problem, we design a Sequential Marginal Gain Greedy (SMG) algorithm that enables effective multi-class training under resource constraints. Furthermore, to improve the computational and communication efficiency during training, we propose an Resource Efficient Class-Wise Low Rank Adaptation (REC-LoRA) strategy, which significantly reduces system overhead while preserving detection performance. Extensive experiments on two representative multimodal industrial anomaly detection datasets, MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior performance and efficiency under the MODIAD scenario.
Fault detection is essential in industrial systems, enabling early identification of abnormal behaviour and improving safety, reliability, and operational efficiency. Modern systems increasingly rely on heterogeneous sensing modalities that capture complementary aspects of the underlying physical process. However, existing data-driven anomaly detection methods often process each modality independently or use simple feature-level fusion, limiting their ability to exploit cross-modal relationships that characterize normal system behaviour. Their performance also commonly assumes similar training and deployment distributions, whereas real-world operation is affected by changing operating conditions, environmental influences, and system degradation that induce distribution shifts and reduce detection performance, especially in unseen regimes. In this work, we propose a multimodal anomaly detection framework based on cross-modal reconstruction of heterogeneous time-series sensor data. Rather than modeling each modality independently, the framework learns system dynamics by reconstructing each modality from the others, thereby exploiting complementary information across modalities. This integrates information across sensing channels without requiring explicit temporal alignment or identical sampling rates, while improving robustness to sensor noise, missing measurements, and modality-specific disturbances. To address distribution shifts during real-world deployment, anomalies are identified using cross-modal reconstruction error and an adaptive test-time thresholding mechanism that adjusts to changing operating conditions. Experiments on three industrial case studies show strong fault detection performance and substantially improved robustness under out-of-distribution conditions, with the largest gains observed in the most challenging operating regimes.
Magnus Munk Jensen, Dorte Hammershøi, Rafał Wiśniewski +1
Knowledge distillation (KD) has been widely studied in unsupervised image Anomaly Detection (AD), but its application to unsupervised multimodal AD remains underexplored. Existing KD-based methods for multimodal AD that use fused multimodal features to obtain teacher representations face challenges. Anomalies that only exist in one modality may not be effectively captured in the fused teacher features, leading to detection failures. Besides, these methods do not fully leverage the rich intra- and inter-modality information that are critical for effective anomaly detection. In this paper, we propose Tuned Reverse Distillation (TRD) based on Multi-branch design to realize Multimodal Industrial AD. By assigning independent branches to each modality, our method enables finer detection of anomalies within each modality. Furthermore, we enhance the interaction between modalities during the distillation process by designing two Crossmodal Tuners including Crossmodal Filter and Amplifier. With the idea of crossmodal mapping, the student network is allowed to better learn normal features while anomalies in all modalities are ensured to be effectively detected. Experimental verifications on multimodal AD datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal anomaly detection and localization. Code is available at https://github.com/hito2448/TRD.
Multi-modal industrial anomaly detection typically relies on separate models for each product category, fundamentally limiting practical scalability. When shifting to a unified paradigm that handles diverse classes simultaneously, detection accuracy often degrades due to inter-class interference and feature manifold confusion. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Unified Reference guided Cross-modal Mapping framework, named Uni-RCM. At its core, we propose a reference guide block to dynamically filter out category-specific noise by introducing a learnable reference feature, which captures the commonalities across different modalities. Besides, an offline residual quantizer is proposed to characterize the normal distribution by multiple cascaded codebooks. Extensive evaluations on the MVTec-3D AD dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance in the challenging multi-class setting and in terms of image-level detection and pixel-level localization.