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IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)

Multi-Spectral Image Classification with Quantum Neural Network

Piotr Gawron, Stanisław Lewiński

Published Sep 26, 2020• 42 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Processing Earth observation images to obtain land cover classification is an important task allowing to track changes on the Earth's surface resulting from natural processes, human activity, and climate change. The amount of data acquired from Earth observation satellites is very large and their processing takes large amount of computational resources. We investigate application of quantum circuit based neural network classifiers for multi-spectral data classification aimed at obtaining the land cover information. We show a proof-of-concept of our approach.

DOI
10.1109/igarss39084.2020.9323065

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Processing Earth observation images to obtain land cover classification is an important task allowing to track changes on the Earth's surface resulting from natural processes, human activity, and climate change. The amount of data acquired from Earth observation satellites is very large and their processing takes large amount of computational resources. We investigate application of quantum circuit based neural network classifiers for multi-spectral data classification aimed at obtaining the land cover information. We show a proof-of-concept of our approach.
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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.
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The amount of study on Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is increasing extensively due to its potential advantages in terms of representational power and computational resources. These advances suggest a possibility to extend its usage into the context of Earth Observations, where Machine Learning (ML) plays an important role due to its extensive amount of data to be manipulated. This paper presents our preliminary results of binary quantum classifiers, which consist of Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs), applied on Earth Observation datasets, EuroSAT and SAT4, with classically-reduced features. Especially, we compare the performance of different data embedding techniques and quantum circuits for binary classification tasks.
Quantum computers consisting of hundreds of noisy qubits are already available and can run specific quantum algorithms although a large-scale fully error-corrected quantum computer is decades away. It is important to study their application to real-life computational problems. One such problem is Land Use and Land Cover classification of Earth Observation data set collected from the earth observation satellite mission using quantum machine learning methods. In this work, we compare the performance of the classical neural network on the re-labeled dataset of the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, when the model has access to Projected Quantum Kernel features. We show that classical neural net-work training accuracy increases drastically when the model has access to Projected Quantum Kernel features. This study shows the potential for quantum machine learning methods to Earth Observation data and provides key evidence for further investigation.
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.