A system identifies anomalies in an image of an object. An input image of the object containing zero or more anomalies is supplied to an image encoder. The image encoder generates an image model. The image model is applied to an image decoder that forms a substitute non-anomalous image of the object. Differences between the input image and the substitute non-anomalous image identify zero or more areas of the input image that contain the zero or more the anomalies. The system implements a flow-based model and has been trained using (a) a set of augmented anomaly-free images of the object applied at the image encoder and (b) a reconstruction loss calculated based on a norm of differences between each augmented anomaly-free image of the object and a corresponding output image from the image decoder.