Explainable Few-Shot Anomaly Detection for Real-Time Automotive Quality Control

Automotive manufacturing quality control faces persistent challenges such as limited defect samples, cross-domain variability, and the demand for interpretable decision-making. This work presents an explainable few-shot anomaly detection framework that integrates EfficientNet-based feature extraction, adaptive prototype learning, and component-specific attention mechanisms to address these requirements. The system is designed for rapid adaptation to novel defect types while maintaining interpretability through a multi-modal explainable AI module that combines visual, quantitative, and textual outputs. Evaluation on automotive datasets demonstrates promising performance on evaluated automotive components, achieving 99.4% accuracy for engine wiring inspection and 98.8% for gear inspection, with improvements of 5.2–7.6% over state-of-the-art baselines, including traditional unsupervised methods (PaDiM, PatchCore), advanced approaches (FastFlow, CFA, DRAEM), and few-shot supervised methods (ProtoNet, MatchingNet, RelationNet, FEAT), and with only 0.63% cross-domain degradation between wiring and gear inspection tasks. The architecture operates under real-time industrial constraints, with an average inference time of 18.2 ms, throughput of 60 components per minute, and memory usage below 2 GB on RTX 3080 hardware. Ablation studies confirm the importance of prototype learning (−4.52%), component analyzers (−2.79%), and attention mechanisms (−2.21%), with K = 5 few-shot configuration providing the best trade-off between accuracy and adaptability. Beyond performance, the framework produces interpretable defect localization, root-cause analysis, and severity-based recommendations designed for manufacturing integration with execution systems via standardized industrial protocols. These results demonstrate a practical and scalable approach for intelligent quality control, enabling robust, interpretable, and adaptive inspection within the evaluated automotive components.