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TinyGLASS: Real-Time Self-Supervised In-Sensor Anomaly Detection

arXiv cs.CV / 3/18/2026

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Key Points

  • TinyGLASS offers real-time, self-supervised anomaly detection directly on the Sony IMX500 edge sensor by replacing the WideResNet-50 backbone with a compact ResNet-18 and adding deployment-oriented optimizations for in-sensor processing.
  • The approach achieves 8.7x parameter compression while maintaining competitive performance, reaching 94.2% image-level AUROC on MVTec-AD and operating at 20 FPS within an 8 MB memory budget.
  • Deployment-oriented techniques such as static graph tracing and INT8 quantization using Sony's Model Compression Toolkit enable efficient edge inference.
  • The work introduces the MMS Dataset for cross-device evaluation and demonstrates robustness to moderate training data contamination at the edge.

Abstract

Anomaly detection plays a key role in industrial quality control, where defects must be identified despite the scarcity of labeled faulty samples. Recent self-supervised approaches, such as GLASS, learn normal visual patterns using only defect-free data and have shown strong performance on industrial benchmarks. However, their computational requirements limit deployment on resource-constrained edge platforms. This work introduces TinyGLASS, a lightweight adaptation of the GLASS framework designed for real-time in-sensor anomaly detection on the Sony IMX500 intelligent vision sensor. The proposed architecture replaces the original WideResNet-50 backbone with a compact ResNet-18 and introduces deployment-oriented modifications that enable static graph tracing and INT8 quantization using Sony's Model Compression Toolkit. In addition to evaluating performance on the MVTec-AD benchmark, we investigate robustness to contaminated training data and introduce a custom industrial dataset, named MMS Dataset, for cross-device evaluation. Experimental results show that TinyGLASS achieves 8.7x parameter compression while maintaining competitive detection performance, reaching 94.2% image-level AUROC on MVTec-AD and operating at 20 FPS within the 8 MB memory constraints of the IMX500 platform. System profiling demonstrates low power consumption (4.0 mJ per inference), real-time end-to-end latency (20 FPS), and high energy efficiency (470 GMAC/J). Furthermore, the model maintains stable performance under moderate levels of training data contamination.