  Anomaly detection is commonly pursued as a one-class classification problem,
where models can only learn from normal training samples, while being evaluated
on both normal and abnormal test samples. Among the successful approaches for
anomaly detection, a distinguished category of methods relies on predicting
masked information (e.g. patches, future frames, etc.) and leveraging the
reconstruction error with respect to the masked information as an abnormality
score. Different from related methods, we propose to integrate the
reconstruction-based functionality into a novel self-supervised predictive
architectural building block. The proposed self-supervised block is generic and
can easily be incorporated into various state-of-the-art anomaly detection
methods. Our block starts with a convolutional layer with dilated filters,
where the center area of the receptive field is masked. The resulting
activation maps are passed through a channel attention module. Our block is
equipped with a loss that minimizes the reconstruction error with respect to
the masked area in the receptive field. We demonstrate the generality of our
block by integrating it into several state-of-the-art frameworks for anomaly
detection on image and video, providing empirical evidence that shows
considerable performance improvements on MVTec AD, Avenue, and ShanghaiTech. We
release our code as open source at https://github.com/ristea/sspcab.
