Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) has achieved significant success in solving various complex problems, such as quantum many-body physics and image recognition. In comparison to the classical Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, the QCNN model requires excellent numerical performance or efficient computational resources to showcase its potential quantum advantages, particularly in classical data processing tasks. In this paper, we propose a computationally resource-efficient QCNN model referred to as RE-QCNN. Specifically, through a comprehensive analysis of the complexity associated with the forward and backward propagation processes in the quantum convolutional layer, our results demonstrate a significant reduction in computational resources required for this layer compared to the classical CNN model. Furthermore, our model is numerically benchmarked on recognizing images from the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, achieving high accuracy in these multi-class classification tasks.
Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) has achieved significant success in solving various complex problems, such as quantum many-body physics and image recognition. In comparison to the classical Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, the QCNN model requires excellent numerical performance or efficient computational resources to showcase its potential quantum advantages, particularly in classical data processing tasks. In this paper, we propose a computationally resource-efficient QCNN model referred to as RE-QCNN. Specifically, through a comprehensive analysis of the complexity associated with the forward and backward propagation processes in the quantum convolutional layer, our results demonstrate a significant reduction in computational resources required for this layer compared to the classical CNN model. Furthermore, our model is numerically benchmarked on recognizing images from the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, achieving high accuracy in these multi-class 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.
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.
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a popular model in computer vision and has the advantage of making good use of the correlation information of data. However, CNN is challenging to learn efficiently if the given dimension of data or model becomes too large. Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) provides a new solution to a problem to solve with CNN using a quantum computing environment, or a direction to improve the performance of an existing learning model. The first study to be introduced proposes a model to effectively solve the classification problem in quantum physics and chemistry by applying the structure of CNN to the quantum computing environment. The research also proposes the model that can be calculated with O(log(n)) depth using Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA). The second study introduces a method to improve the model's performance by adding a layer using quantum computing to the CNN learning model used in the existing computer vision. This model can also be used in small quantum computers, and a hybrid learning model can be designed by adding a quantum convolution layer to the CNN model or replacing it with a convolution layer. This paper also verifies whether the QCNN model is capable of efficient learning compared to CNN through training using the MNIST dataset through the TensorFlow Quantum platform.
Quantum machine learning is emerging as a promising frontier at the intersection of quantum computing and Artificial Intelligence, offering potential gains in speed, efficiency, and robustness. In this paper, a hybrid Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) architecture is presented for visual pattern recognition tasks, leveraging quantum superposition and entanglement for enhanced feature extraction. Unlike previous studies that focus on small-scale or simplified datasets, this study systematically evaluates QCNNs across multiple benchmark datasets and provides a direct comparison with classical CNNs, highlighting practical quantum advantages such as parameter efficiency and noise-resilience. The proposed approach encodes classical image data from benchmark datasets, including70K28×28grayscale images from MNIST and FashionMNIST, and60Kdownsampled grayscale CIFAR-10 images, into quantum states using amplitude encoding, followed by hierarchical quantum convolution and pooling layers implemented via parametrised quantum circuits (PQCs). The model culminates in a classical dense layer for final classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the QCNN achieves competitive performance on low-dimensional grayscale datasets with 93.2 % accuracy on MNIST and 88.5% on Fashion MNIST, though it underperforms on more complex datasets like CIFAR-10 with 67.8 % accuracy due to current quantum hardware limitations. While not yet surpassing classical CNNs in raw accuracy, the proposed QCNN exhibits notable parameter efficiency, noise resilience, and theoretical potential for energy-efficient computation, highlighting its promise for future applications as quantum technologies mature.
Abstract Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) are a significant quantum machine learning architecture. However, most current designs still mimic the ‘convolution-pooling’ structure of classical CNNs, facing dual challenges of limited feature extraction and inefficient quantum resource usage. To address this, we propose a QCNN based on a hierarchical Ansatz design. Its core is an alternating ‘convolution-entanglement’ structure, which replaces abrupt qubit discarding in traditional pooling with sequential global entanglement layers. This enables non-destructive directional information aggregation, aiming to preserve quantum correlations in data more comprehensively. In the encoding layer, we integrate Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial (IQP) encoding to mitigate the dimensionality mismatch between high-dimensional classical data and limited quantum resources. To systematically evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture, we conducted extensive experiments on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. The results demonstrate that: 1) Under various convolutional kernel configurations, our model achieves excellent classification performance, peaking at 99.39% accuracy on MNIST; 2) Even with minimalistic single-qubit rotation gates as the convolutional layer, the model attains 99.14% accuracy using only 16 parameters, demonstrating high parameter efficiency; 3) Crucially, experiments reveal a nonlinear relationship between quantum resources and performance. When qubits exceed a task-specific optimal number, performance declines significantly due to feature space dilution and exacerbated Barren Plateaus. This suggests that, under current quantum hardware conditions, matching resource allocation to task complexity may be more critical than simply scaling up the system. This study offers one potential direction for exploring QCNN architectures. The findings still require further validation across more diverse tasks and in quantum hardware environments closer to practical conditions. We hope this work can provide some useful insights and inform subsequent research.
In the field of image processing, a well-known model is the Convolutional Neural Network, or CNN. The unique benefit that sets this model apart is its exceptional ability to use the correlation information included in the data. Even with their amazing accomplishment, conventional CNNs could have trouble improving further in terms of generalization, accuracy, and computing economy. However, it could be challenging to train CNN correctly and process information quickly if the model or data dimensions are too large. This is since it will cause the data processing to lag. The Quantum Convolutional Neural Network, or QCNN for short, is a novel proposed quantum solution that might either enhance the functionality of an existing learning model or solve a problem requiring the combination of quantum computing with CNN. To highlight the flexibility and versatility of quantum circuits in improving feature extraction capabilities, this paper compares deep quantum circuit architecture designed for image-based tasks with classical Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and a novel quantum circuit architecture. The covidx-cxr4 dataset was used to train quantum-CNN models, and their results were compared against those of other models. The results show that when paired with innovative feature extraction methods, the suggested deep Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) outperformed the conventional CNN in terms of processing speed and recognition accuracy. Even though it required more processing time, QCNN outperformed CNN in terms of recognition accuracy. When training on the covidx-cxr4 dataset, this dominance becomes much more apparent, demonstrating how deeper quantum computing has the potential to completely transform image classification problems.