Quality control and predictive maintenance are two essential pillars of Industry 4.0, aiming to optimize production, reduce operational costs, and enhance system reliability. Real-time visual inspection ensures early detection of manufacturing defects, assembly errors, or texture inconsistencies, preventing defective products from reaching customers. Predictive maintenance leverages sensor data by analyzing vibrations, temperature, and pressure signals to anticipate failures and avoid production downtime. Image-based quality control has become critical in industries such as automotive, electronics, aerospace, and food processing, where visual appearance is a key quality indicator. Although advances in deep learning and computer vision have significantly improved anomaly detection, industrial deployments remain challenged by the scarcity of labeled anomalies and the variability of defects. These issues increasingly lead to the adoption of unsupervised methods and generative approaches, which, despite their effectiveness, introduce substantial computational complexity. We conduct a unified comparison of ten anomaly detection methods, categorizing them according to their reliance on synthetic anomaly generation and their detection strategy, either reconstruction-based or feature-based. All models are trained exclusively on normal data to mirror realistic industrial conditions. Our evaluation framework combines performance metrics such as recall, precision, and their harmonic mean, emphasizing the need to minimize false negatives that could lead to critical production failures. In addition, we assess environmental impact and hardware complexity to better guide method selection. Practical recommendations are provided to balance robustness, operational feasibility, and sustainability in industrial applications.

With the emergence of smartphones, video surveillance cameras, social networks, and multimedia engines, as well as the development of the internet and connected objects (the Internet of Things—IoT), the number of available images is increasing very quickly. This leads to the necessity of managing a huge amount of data using Big Data technologies. In this context, several sectors, such as security and medicine, need to extract image features (index) in order to quickly and efficiently find these data with high precision. To reach this first goal, two main approaches exist in the literature. The first one uses classical methods based on the extraction of visual features, such as color, texture, and shape for indexation. The accuracy of these methods was acceptable until the early 2010s. The second approach is based on convolutional neuronal networks (CNN), which offer better precision due to the largeness of the descriptors, but they can cause an increase in research time and storage space. To decrease the research time, one needs to reduce the size of these vectors (descriptors) by using dimensionality reduction methods. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows the problem of the “curse of dimensionality” to be solved thanks to an efficient combination of convolutional neural networks and dimensionality reduction methods. Our contribution consists of defining the best combination approach between the CNN layers and the regional maximum activation of convolutions (RMAC) method and its variants. With our combined approach, we propose providing reduced descriptors that will accelerate the research time and reduce the storage space while maintaining precision. We conclude by proposing the best position of an RMAC layer with an increase in accuracy ranging from 4.03% to 27.34%, a decrease in research time ranging from 89.66% to 98.14% in the function of CNN architecture, and a reduction in the size of the descriptor vector by 97.96% on the GHIM-10K benchmark database.

Indexing images by content is one of the most used computer vision methods, where various techniques are used to extract visual characteristics from images. The deluge of data surrounding us, due the high use of social and diverse media acquisition systems, has created a major challenge for classical multimedia processing systems. This problem is referred to as the ‘curse of dimensionality’. In the literature, several methods have been used to decrease the high dimension of features, including principal component analysis (PCA) and locality sensitive hashing (LSH). Some methods, such as VA-File or binary tree, can be used to accelerate the search phase. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach that exploits three particular methods, those being PCA and LSH for dimensionality reduction, and the VA-File method to accelerate the search phase. This combined approach is fast and can be used for high dimensionality features. Indeed, our method consists of three phases: (1) image indexing within SIFT and SURF algorithms, (2) compressing the data using LSH and PCA, and (3) finally launching the image retrieval process, which is accelerated by using a VA-File approach.