OutlierNets: Highly Compact Deep Autoencoder Network Architectures for On-Device Acoustic Anomaly Detection

Abstract: Human operators often diagnose industrial machinery via anomalous sounds. Automated acoustic anomaly detection can lead to reliable maintenance of machinery. However, deep learning-driven anomaly detection methods often require an extensive amount of computational resources which prohibits their deployment in factories. Here we explore a machine-driven design exploration strategy to create OutlierNets, a family of highly compact deep convolutional autoencoder network architectures featuring as few as 686 parameters, model sizes as small as 2.7 KB, and as low as 2.8 million FLOPs, with a detection accuracy matching or exceeding published architectures with as many as 4 million parameters. Furthermore, CPU-accelerated latency experiments show that the OutlierNet architectures can achieve as much as 21x lower latency than published networks.