An anomaly detection method based on double encoder–decoder generative adversarial networks

Purpose This study aims to address the challenge of training a detection model for the robot to detect the abnormal samples in the industrial environment, while abnormal patterns are very rare under this condition. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose a new model with double encoder–decoder (DED) generative adversarial networks to detect anomalies when the model is trained without any abnormal patterns. The DED approach is used to map high-dimensional input images to a low-dimensional space, through which the latent variables are obtained. Minimizing the change in the latent variables during the training process helps the model learn the data distribution. Anomaly detection is achieved by calculating the distance between two low-dimensional vectors obtained from two encoders. Findings The proposed method has better accuracy and F1 score when compared with traditional anomaly detection models. Originality/value A new architecture with a DED pipeline is designed to capture the distribution of images in the training process so that anomalous samples are accurately identified. A new weight function is introduced to control the proportion of losses in the encoding reconstruction and adversarial phases to achieve better results. An anomaly detection model is proposed to achieve superior performance against prior state-of-the-art approaches.