Autoencoder-Based Anomaly Detection in Industrial X-ray Images

Within many quality-critical industries, e.g. the aerospace industry, industrial X-ray inspection is an essential as well as a resource intense part of quality control. Within such industries the X-ray image interpretation is typically still done by humans, therefore, increasing the interpretation automatization would be of great value. We claim, that safe automatic interpretation of industrial X-ray images, requires a robust confidence estimation with respect to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this work we have explored if such a confidence estimation can be achieved by comparing input images with a model of the accepted images. For the image model we derived an autoencoder which we trained unsupervised on a public dataset with X-ray images of metal fusion-welds. We achieved a true positive rate at 80–90% at a 4% false positive rate, as well as correctly detected an OOD data example as an anomaly.