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IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)

Quantum Convolutional Circuits for Earth Observation Image Classification

Su Yeon Chang, Bertrand Le Saux, Sofia Vallecorsa, Michele Grossi

Published Jul 17, 2022• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/igarss46834.2022.9883992

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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.
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.
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.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are extensively utilized for image classification due to their ability to exploit data correlations effectively. However, traditional CNNs encounter several challenges, including limitations in accuracy improvement, computational efficiency, explain ability, and generalization. As data dimensionality or model complexity increases, CNNs often become more difficult to train efficiently, leading to slower processing times. To overcome these challenges, Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) offer a promising quantum-based approach to enhance existing models, particularly by improving training efficiency and reducing processing times. This paper provides a comparative analysis of classical CNNs and a novel quantum circuit architecture tailored for image-based tasks. The analysis emphasizes the adaptability and potential of quantum circuits to enhance feature extraction, recognition accuracy, and processing efficiency.We applied various QCNN architectures to the Chinese-MNIST dataset and compared their performance with traditional CNN models. Although QCNNs achieved slightly lower accuracy, they demonstrated significantly greater stability. These findings high- light QCNNs’ potential to overcome the computational limitations of conventional deep learning, offering a promising pathway for quantum-enhanced solutions in computer vision. Future work will focus on refining quantum circuit designs, developing hybrid quantum-classical models, and extending QCNN applications to larger and more diverse datasets.
Due to the rapid growth of earth observation (EO) data and the complexity of machine learning models, the high requirement on the computation power for EO data analysis becomes a bottleneck. Exploiting quantum computing might tackle this challenge in the future. In this paper, we present a hybrid quantum-classical convolutional neural network (QC-CNN) to classify EO data which can accelerate feature extraction compared with its classical counterpart and handle multi-category classification tasks with reduced quantum resources. The model's validity is verified with the Overhead-MNIST dataset through the TensorFlow Quantum platform.
Artificial neural networks have achieved great success in many fields ranging from image recognition to video understanding. However, its high requirements for computing and memory resources have limited further development on processing big data with high dimensions. In recent years, advances in quantum computing show that building neural networks on quantum processors is a potential solution to this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model named Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN), aiming at utilizing the computing power of quantum systems to accelerate classical machine learning tasks. The designed QCNN is based on implementable quantum circuits and has a similar structure as classical convolutional neural networks. Numerical simulation results on the MNIST dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
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.