RareCLIP: Rarity-aware Online Zero-shot Industrial Anomaly Detection

Large vision-language models such as CLIP have made significant strides in zero-shot anomaly detection through prompt engineering.However, most existing methods typically process each test image individually, ignoring the practical rarity of abnormal patches in real-world scenarios.Although some batch-based approaches exploit the rarity by processing multiple samples concurrently, they generally introduce unacceptable latency for real-time applications.To mitigate these limitations, we propose RareCLIP, a novel online zero-shot anomaly detection framework that enables sequential image processing in real-time without requiring prior knowledge of the target domain.RareCLIP capitalizes on the zero-shot capabilities of CLIP and integrates a dynamic test-time rarity estimation mechanism.A key innovation of our framework is the introduction of a prototype patch feature memory bank, which aggregates representative features from historical observations and continuously updates their corresponding rarity measures.For each incoming image patch, RareCLIP computes a rarity score by aggregating the rarity measures of its nearest neighbors within the memory bank.Moreover, we introduce a prototype sampling strategy based on dissimilarity to enhance computational efficiency, as well as a similarity calibration strategy to enhance the robustness of rarity estimation.Extensive experiments demonstrate that RareCLIP attains state-of-the-art performance with 98.2\% image-level AUROC on MVTec AD and 94.5\% on VisA, while achieving a latency of 59.4 ms. The code will be made publicly available.