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arXiv:2504.11782 · IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

HyperKING: Quantum-Classical Generative Adversarial Networks for Hyperspectral Image Restoration

Chia-Hsiang Lin, Si-Sheng Young

Published Jan 1, 2025• 18 citations
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Abstract

Quantum machine intelligence starts showing its impact on satellite remote sensing (SRS). Also, recent literature exhibits that quantum generative intelligences encompass superior potential than their classical counterpart, motivating us to develop quantum generative adversarial networks (GANs) for SRS. However, existing quantum GANs are restricted by the limited quantum bit (qubit) resources of current quantum computers and process merely a small 2 × 2 grayscale image, far from being applicable to SRS. Recently, the novel concept of hybrid quantum-classical GAN, a quantum generator with a classical discriminator, has upgraded the order to 28 × 28 (still grayscale), whereas it is still insufficient for SRS. This motivates us to design a radically new hybrid framework, where both generator and discriminator are hybrid architectures. We demonstrate this feasibility, leading to a breakthrough of processing 128×128 hyperspectral images for SRS. Specifically, we design the quantum part with mathematically provable quantum full expressibility (FE) to address core signal processing tasks, wherein the FE property allows the quantum network to realize any valid quantum operator with appropriate training. The classical part, composed of convolutional layers, treats the read-in (compressing the optical information into limited qubits) and read-out (addressing the quantum collapse effect) procedures. The proposed innovative hybrid quantum GAN, named “Hyperspectral Knot-like IntelligeNt dIscrimiNator and Generator” (HyperKING), where “knot” partly symbolizes the quantum entanglement and partly the compressed quantum domain in the central part of the network architecture. HyperKING significantly surpasses the classical approaches in hyperspectral tensor completion, mixed noise removal (about 3dB improvement), and blind source separation results.

DOI
10.1109/tgrs.2025.3561951

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Quantum machine intelligence starts showing its impact on satellite remote sensing (SRS). Also, recent literature exhibits that quantum generative intelligences encompass superior potential than their classical counterpart, motivating us to develop quantum generative adversarial networks (GANs) for SRS. However, existing quantum GANs are restricted by the limited quantum bit (qubit) resources of current quantum computers and process merely a small 2 × 2 grayscale image, far from being applicable to SRS. Recently, the novel concept of hybrid quantum-classical GAN, a quantum generator with a classical discriminator, has upgraded the order to 28 × 28 (still grayscale), whereas it is still insufficient for SRS. This motivates us to design a radically new hybrid framework, where both generator and discriminator are hybrid architectures. We demonstrate this feasibility, leading to a breakthrough of processing 128×128 hyperspectral images for SRS. Specifically, we design the quantum part with mathematically provable quantum full expressibility (FE) to address core signal processing tasks, wherein the FE property allows the quantum network to realize any valid quantum operator with appropriate training. The classical part, composed of convolutional layers, treats the read-in (compressing the optical information into limited qubits) and read-out (addressing the quantum collapse effect) procedures. The proposed innovative hybrid quantum GAN, named “Hyperspectral Knot-like IntelligeNt dIscrimiNator and Generator” (HyperKING), where “knot” partly symbolizes the quantum entanglement and partly the compressed quantum domain in the central part of the network architecture. HyperKING significantly surpasses the classical approaches in hyperspectral tensor completion, mixed noise removal (about 3dB improvement), and blind source separation results.
Considering that there are many NP-hard problems in remote sensing (e.g., Craig simplex computation in hyperspectral un-mixing), it is natural to introduce quantum computing into space remote sensing. However, current quantum computers have some practical limitations, requiring complementary techniques to support quantum computing. Specifically, we are introducing artificial intelligence (AI) to solve the quantum collapse effect and the phenomenon of insufficient quantum bits (qubits). We thereby propose the hyperspectral quantum deep network (HyperQUEEN) for satellite remote sensing. HyperQUEEN is the first quantum technology that successfully outputs a complete hyperspectral image, given the very limited qubit resources. Existing quantum image processing methods can only achieve classification-level tasks or simple geometry transforms, and are far from being applicable to advanced satellite missions like restoration of damaged hyperspectral images, which HyperQUEEN has successfully achieved for the first time. Remarkable computational efficiency and restoration performances achieved by the radically new quantum AI system—HyperQUEEN—will be reported.
Adversarial learning is of paramount importance in numerous recent computing areas, while quantum entanglement has also revealed its role in efficient computing. This motivated us to bring quantum computing into adversarial learning. Though there are some preliminary theoretical studies of quantum adversarial learning (QAL), there has no demonstration of advanced real-world applications. For the first time, we design and implement a QAL framework, and demonstrate the feasibility of QAL-based hyperspectral image processing for remote sensing. This research line aims to lay the foundation for the QAL in hyperspectral remote sensing, including to solve the limited qubit resources, to mitigate the quantum collapse effect, to design a quantum discriminator with comparable ability, as well as to ensure the quantum expressibility of the generator, to name a few.
Quantum machine learning (QML) has received increasing attention due to its potential to outperform classical machine learning methods in problems such as classification and identification tasks. A subclass of QML methods is quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) which have been studied as a quantum counterpart of classical GANs widely used in image manipulation and generation tasks. The existing work on QGANs is still limited to small-scale proof-of-concept examples based on images with significant down-scaling. Here we integrate classical and quantum techniques to propose a new hybrid quantum-classical GAN framework. We demonstrate its superior learning capabilities over existing quantum techniques by generating 28×28 pixels grey-scale images without dimensionality reduction or classical pre/post-processing on multiple classes of the standard MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets, which achieves comparable results to classical frameworks with three orders of magnitude less trainable generator parameters. To gain further insight into the working of our hybrid approach, we systematically explore the impact of its parameter space by varying the number of qubits, the size of image patches, the number of layers in the generator, the shape of the patches and the choice of prior distribution. Our results show that increasing the quantum generator size generally improves the learning capability of the network. The developed framework provides a foundation for future design of QGANs with optimal parameter set tailored for complex image generation tasks
Quantum science just winning the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics must lead future development of remote sensing technologies. However, given the very limited number of entangled quantum bits (qubits) even in the most advanced quantum computers, is processing remotely sensed hyperspectral image (featured by its large data volume) using quantum computer technically feasible? Even if the quantum image state can be well processed to the quantum state of the target image (QSTI), it cannot be perfectly retrieved/output as the QSTI will collapse to some eigenstate once it is measured. Owing to these challenges, current quantum image processing technologies can only achieve classification-level applications requiring just a few output qubits. We design a hyperspectral quantum deep network (HyperQUEEN) to encode the hyperspectral information using very few qubits, as well as to learn the mapping from some measuring statistics (associated with the collapsed-QSTI) to the target image (instead of directly retrieving the unobservable QSTI), thereby solving the challenges. HyperQUEEN is the first quantum architecture that makes a breakthrough to blindly reconstruct NASA’s damaged hyperspectral images, which means a lot for the upcoming space era. As the immature quantum facility nowadays does not yet allow us to fully exhibit its high potential, we are not aiming at developing state-of-the-art methods, but are demonstrating the feasibility of quantum hyperspectral remote sensing. Mathematical analysis guiding our design toward the low-rank quantum deep network, together with comprehensive experiments, will also be reported.
Quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) have attracted increasing attention for their potential to surpass classical generative models by leveraging the expressive power of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). However, in the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum era, the implementation of fully quantum algorithms is hindered by hardware limitations, restricting most existing approaches to low-resolution generated image. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical generative adversarial network for patch-based image generation. Our method employs dual PQC-based generators that decompose images into structured patches, while local and global classical discriminators jointly capture local details and preserve global structural coherence. This design addresses scalability limitations of existing QGANs and mitigates patch-boundary artifacts, thereby enabling high-resolution image generation on hardware with restricted qubit counts. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating improvements in image fidelity over existing baselines, and providing insights into the influence of qubit count on generative performance.
Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs), as a rising paradigm in Quantum Machine Learning, have shown promising potential in image generation and processing. However, their output quality remains suboptimal, and existing research is largely limited to small-scale, proof-of-concept studies. In this work, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical GAN architecture, where the generator integrates parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) and classical neural networks. This integration significantly enhances the visual quality of generated images. Our model leverages the complementary strengths of quantum and classical components and outperforms existing methods (Tsang et al. in IEEE Trans. Quantum Eng. 4:1–19, 2023 ; Gulrajani et al. in Proceedings of the 31st international conference on neural information processing systems. NIPS’17, Red Hook, pp. 5769–5779, 2017 ), particularly in terms of image fidelity. Experiments conducted on the MNIST family of datasets show that our hybrid approach achieves a 20.26% average reduction in Fréchet Inception Distance. Furthermore, it improves the Structural Similarity Index Measure, Cosine Similarity, and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio by 26.04%, 2.22%, and 7.62%, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining quantum computing with machine learning, and underscore the potential of hybrid quantum-classical models in advancing generative tasks.