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IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters

Classification of Remote Sensing Images With Parameterized Quantum Gates

Soronzonbold Otgonbaatar, Mihai P. Datcu

Published Sep 9, 2021• 57 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This letter studies how to program and assess a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) for classifying Earth observation (EO) satellite images. In this exploratory study, we assess a PQC for classifying a two-label EO image dataset and compare it with a classic deep learning classifier. We use the PQC with an input space of only 17 quantum bits (qubits) due to the current limitations of quantum technology. As a real-world image for EO, we selected the Eurosat dataset obtained from multispectral Sentinel-2 images as a training dataset and a Sentinel-2 image of Berlin, Germany, as a test image. However, the high dimensionality of our images is incompatible with the PQC input domain of 17 qubits. Hence, we had to reduce the dimensionality of the input images for this two-label case to a vector with 16 elements; the 17th qubit remains reserved for storing label information. We employed a very deep convolutional network with an autoencoder as a technique for the dimensionality reduction of the input image, and we mapped the dimensionally reduced image onto 16 qubits by means of parameter thresholding. Then, we used a PQC to classify the two-label content of the dimensionally reduced Eurosat image dataset. A PQC classifies the Eurosat images with high accuracy as a classic deep learning method (and with even better accuracy in some instances). From our experiment, we derived and enhanced deeper insight into programming future gate-based quantum computers for many practical problems in EO.

DOI
10.1109/lgrs.2021.3108014

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This letter studies how to program and assess a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) for classifying Earth observation (EO) satellite images. In this exploratory study, we assess a PQC for classifying a two-label EO image dataset and compare it with a classic deep learning classifier. We use the PQC with an input space of only 17 quantum bits (qubits) due to the current limitations of quantum technology. As a real-world image for EO, we selected the Eurosat dataset obtained from multispectral Sentinel-2 images as a training dataset and a Sentinel-2 image of Berlin, Germany, as a test image. However, the high dimensionality of our images is incompatible with the PQC input domain of 17 qubits. Hence, we had to reduce the dimensionality of the input images for this two-label case to a vector with 16 elements; the 17th qubit remains reserved for storing label information. We employed a very deep convolutional network with an autoencoder as a technique for the dimensionality reduction of the input image, and we mapped the dimensionally reduced image onto 16 qubits by means of parameter thresholding. Then, we used a PQC to classify the two-label content of the dimensionally reduced Eurosat image dataset. A PQC classifies the Eurosat images with high accuracy as a classic deep learning method (and with even better accuracy in some instances). From our experiment, we derived and enhanced deeper insight into programming future gate-based quantum computers for many practical problems in EO.
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.
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.
Satellite image classification is a crucial task in remote sensing for applications such as land cover mapping, environmental monitoring, and resource management. While classical machine learning models such as SVMs achieve strong accuracy, they are often sensitive to noise, parameter-heavy, and less efficient when training data is scarce. In this work, we propose a hybrid quantum–classical pipeline for binary land cover classification on the EuroSAT dataset, combining a convolutional autoencoder for feature extraction with a Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) inspired by quantum convolutional neural networks. The proposed QCNN–VQC achieves 90.0% accuracy, but more importantly outperforms baselines on F1-score (0.9428 after threshold tuning), AUROC (0.9819), and AUPRC (0.9812), while requiring fewer parameters. The model also demonstrates superior robustness to label noise and attains exceptionally high recall for the SeaLake class (97.8%), ensuring reliable detection of water bodies. These results highlight the promise of quantum machine learning for practical remote sensing tasks, especially in noisy or low-data regimes.
Abstract Existing quantum hardware is limited in the number of bits and length of the series of operations. Nevertheless, by shifting parts of the computation on classical hardware, hybrid quantum-classical systems utilize quantum hardware for scaled-down machine learning approaches, which is quantum machine learning. Due to the theoretically possible computational speed-up of quantum computers compared to classical computers and the increasing volume and speed of data generated in earth observation, attempts are now being made to use quantum computers for satellite image processing. However, satellite imagery is too large and high dimensional, and transformations that reduce the dimensionality are necessary to fit the classical data in the limited input domain of quantum circuits. This paper presents and compares several dimensionality reduction techniques as part of hybrid quantum-classical systems to represent satellite images with up to 256×256×3256\times 256\times 3256×256×3 256 × 256 × 3 values with only 16 values. We evaluate the representations of two benchmark datasets with supervised classification by four different quantum circuit architectures. We demonstrate the potential use of quantum machine learning for satellite image classification and give a comprehensive overview of the impact of various satellite image representations on the performance of quantum classifiers. It shows that autoencoder models are best suited to create small-scale representations, outperforming commonly used methods such as principle component analysis.
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.
This article examines the current status of quantum computing in Earth observation (EO) and satellite imagery. We analyze the potential limitations and applications of quantum learning models when dealing with satellite data, considering the persistent challenges of profiting from quantum advantage and finding the optimal sharing between high-performance computing (HPC) and quantum computing (QC). We then assess some parameterized quantum circuit models transpiled into a Clifford+T universal gate set. The T-gates shed light on the quantum resources required to deploy quantum models, either on an HPC system or several QC systems. In particular, if the T-gates cannot be simulated efficiently on an HPC system, we can apply a quantum computer and its computational power over conventional techniques. Our quantum resource estimation showed that quantum machine learning (QML) models, with a sufficient number of T-gates, provide the quantum advantage if and only if they generalize on unseen data points better than their classical counterparts deployed on the HPC system and they break the symmetry in their weights at each learning iteration like in conventional deep neural networks. We also estimated the quantum resources required for some QML models as an initial innovation. Lastly, we defined the optimal sharing between an HPC+QC system for executing QML models for hyperspectral satellite images. These are a unique dataset compared to other satellite images since they have a limited number of input qubits and a small number of labeled benchmark images, making them less challenging to deploy on quantum computers.