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arXiv:2608.00072

Volcanic Clouds Detection through QCNN and Geostationary Satellite Multispectral Imagery

Federica Torrisi, Claudia Corradino, Alessandro Grilli, Tommaso Catuogno, Mattia Verducci, Elisabetta Paladino, Luigi Giannelli, Alessandro Sebastianelli

Published Jul 29, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Recent advances in quantum computing are opening new possibilities for Earth Observation (EO) data analysis. Quantum machine learning (QML) approaches offer novel ways to process information by exploiting quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement. These capabilities have motivated the exploration of whether quantum-enhanced models can address long-standing challenges in satellite remote sensing, where complex spectral and spatial signals often require sophisticated feature extraction. Among various fields of application, EO data allow the global monitoring of volcanic clouds and are crucial for aviation safety, hazard assessment, real-time eruption response, and evaluation of volcanic impacts on climate. Yet accurate detection of volcanic clouds remains difficult due to their similarity with meteorological clouds, the variability of eruption signatures, and the coarse spectral sampling of geostationary sensors. In this work, the potential of hybrid quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) for the classification of satellite images containing volcanic clouds was investigated. These architectures integrate quantum computational layers into a classical convolutional framework. Two QCNN variants (with 2 and 4 qubits) have been considered to evaluate their ability to classify a dataset of SEVIRI images, including scenes with volcanic clouds (composed of ash, $SO_2$, or mixed components) as well as non-volcanic backgrounds. Finally, the performance of the hybrid QCNN models was compared with that of purely classical architectures.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2608.00072

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Recent advances in quantum computing are opening new possibilities for Earth Observation (EO) data analysis. Quantum machine learning (QML) approaches offer novel ways to process information by exploiting quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement. These capabilities have motivated the exploration of whether quantum-enhanced models can address long-standing challenges in satellite remote sensing, where complex spectral and spatial signals often require sophisticated feature extraction. Among various fields of application, EO data allow the global monitoring of volcanic clouds and are crucial for aviation safety, hazard assessment, real-time eruption response, and evaluation of volcanic impacts on climate. Yet accurate detection of volcanic clouds remains difficult due to their similarity with meteorological clouds, the variability of eruption signatures, and the coarse spectral sampling of geostationary sensors. In this work, the potential of hybrid quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) for the classification of satellite images containing volcanic clouds was investigated. These architectures integrate quantum computational layers into a classical convolutional framework. Two QCNN variants (with 2 and 4 qubits) have been considered to evaluate their ability to classify a dataset of SEVIRI images, including scenes with volcanic clouds (composed of ash, SO2SO_2SO2​, or mixed components) as well as non-volcanic backgrounds. Finally, the performance of the hybrid QCNN models was compared with that of purely classical architectures.
As Earth Observation (EO) enters the Big Data era, the exponential volume of daily satellite imagery poses significant computational and storage challenges for classical Deep Learning (DL) models. Moreover, current approaches often struggle to generalize across heterogeneous sensors and volcanic environments while requiring large labeled datasets and substantial computational resources. These limitations are particularly critical for emerging On-Board Processing (OBP) applications, where memory, computational power, and annotated data are inherently limited. This work proposes a Hybrid Quantum AlexNet architecture for cross-sensor recognition of volcanic thermal activity at the global scale. The proposed model combines a classical convolutional backbone for high-level spatial features extraction with a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) acting as a variational layer. By embedding high-level image representations into a high-dimensional Hilbert space, the quantum layer learns task-specific representations that enhance feature discrimination. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid quantum model learns more discriminative feature representations, leading to improved cross-sensor transferability and robustness across heterogeneous volcanic environments using fewer trainable parameters and reduced training data than its classical counterpart.
This article aims to investigate how circuit-based hybrid quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) can be successfully employed as image classifiers in the context of remote sensing. The hybrid QCNNs enrich the classical architecture of convolutional neural networks by introducing a quantum layer within a standard neural network. The novel QCNN proposed in this work is applied to the land-use and land-cover classification, chosen as an Earth observation (EO) use case, and tested on the EuroSAT dataset used as the reference benchmark. The results of the multiclass classification prove the effectiveness of the presented approach by demonstrating that the QCNN performances are higher than the classical counterparts. Moreover, investigation of various quantum circuits shows that the ones exploiting quantum entanglement achieve the best classification scores. This study underlines the potentialities of applying quantum computing to an EO case study and provides the theoretical and experimental background for future investigations.
Remote sensing imagery classification remains a formidable challenge, primarily attributed to the high dimensionality and complexity inherent in the data. While deep learning has demonstrated efficacy in this domain, its computational demands and reliance on extensive training data pose significant hurdles. This research investigates how quantum computing could be able to overcome these constraints and improve deep learning’s capacity for classifying remote sensing data. The study provides an extensive review of recent developments in quantum deep learning techniques specifically tailored for remote sensing applications. Various quantum algorithms designed for image feature extraction and classification are discussed, shedding light on their potential to revolutionize the field. As a practical demonstration, the chapter presents a case study focused on leveraging quantum deep learning for land cover classification using Sentinel-2 imagery. This chapter’s main focus is on hybrid quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) based on circuits as effective tools for remote sensing picture classification. These hybrid models integrate quantum layers within traditional neural networks, introducing a novel paradigm for image analysis. To evaluate the efficacy of this approach, the proposed QCNN architecture is applied to land-use and land-cover classification, employing the Euro SAT dataset as a benchmark.
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Image classification plays an important role in remote sensing. Earth observation (EO) has inevitably arrived in the big data era, but the high requirement on computation power has already become a bottleneck for analyzing large amounts of remote sensing data with sophisticated machine learning models. Exploiting quantum computing might contribute to a solution to tackle this challenge by leveraging quantum properties. This article introduces a hybrid quantum-classical convolutional neural network (QC-CNN) that applies quantum computing to effectively extract high-level critical features from EO data for classification purposes. Besides that, the adoption of the amplitude encoding technique reduces the required quantum bit resources. The complexity analysis indicates that the proposed model can accelerate the convolutional operation in comparison with its classical counterpart. The model's performance is evaluated with different EO benchmarks, including Overhead-MNIST, So2Sat LCZ42, PatternNet, RSI-CB256, and NaSC-TG2, through the TensorFlow Quantum platform, and it can achieve better performance than its classical counterpart and have higher generalizability, which verifies the validity of the QC-CNN model on EO data classification tasks.
Exploiting machine learning techniques to automatically classify multispectral remote sensing imagery plays a significant role in deriving changes on the Earth’s surface. However, the computation power required to manage large Earth observation data and apply sophisticated machine learning models for this analysis purpose has become an intractable bottleneck. Leveraging quantum computing provides a possibility to tackle this challenge in the future. This article focuses on land cover classification by analyzing Sentinel-2 images with quantum computing. Two hybrid quantum-classical deep learning frameworks are proposed. Both models exploit quantum computing to extract features efficiently from multispectral images and classical computing for final classification. As proof of concept, numerical simulation results on the LCZ42 dataset through the TensorFlow Quantum platform verify our models' validity. The experiments indicate that our models can extract features more effectively compared with their classical counterparts, specifically, the convolutional neural network (CNN) model. Our models demonstrated improvements, with an average test accuracy increase of 4.5% and 3.3%, respectively, in comparison to the CNN model. In addition, our proposed models exhibit better transferability and robustness than CNN models.