Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have drawn considerable attention over the last decade thanks to their high spectral resolution. However, as hardware limitations often cause the low spatial resolution of HSIs compared to traditional RGB and multispectral images, the hyperspectral image super-resolution (HSR) problem becomes crucial in facilitating the subsequent material identification applications. Recently, we developed hyperspectral quantum deep network (HyperQUEEN) for satellite data restoration, thereby proving that quantum features do play some role in developing high-performance inverse imaging algorithms. Before HyperQUEEN, which elegantly performs the hyperspectral matrix/tensor factorization via the so-called low-rank module, other existing quantum image processing tasks can only achieve basic geometry transforms or simple classification-level tasks. In this work, we go a step further by investigating the quantum implementation of multi-scale feature fusion (MF) transformer and applying the HyperQUEEN-MF to solve the challenging inverse problem known as single HSR (SHSR). By learning multi-scale quantum features, the proposed HyperQUEEN-MF does show outstanding SHSR performances, while the experimental results also show the feasibility of quantum-driven hyperspectral super-resolution. This creates a door for solving other advanced challenging inverse problems via quantum feature information extraction and processing.
Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have drawn considerable attention over the last decade thanks to their high spectral resolution. However, as hardware limitations often cause the low spatial resolution of HSIs compared to traditional RGB and multispectral images, the hyperspectral image super-resolution (HSR) problem becomes crucial in facilitating the subsequent material identification applications. Recently, we developed hyperspectral quantum deep network (HyperQUEEN) for satellite data restoration, thereby proving that quantum features do play some role in developing high-performance inverse imaging algorithms. Before HyperQUEEN, which elegantly performs the hyperspectral matrix/tensor factorization via the so-called low-rank module, other existing quantum image processing tasks can only achieve basic geometry transforms or simple classification-level tasks. In this work, we go a step further by investigating the quantum implementation of multi-scale feature fusion (MF) transformer and applying the HyperQUEEN-MF to solve the challenging inverse problem known as single HSR (SHSR). By learning multi-scale quantum features, the proposed HyperQUEEN-MF does show outstanding SHSR performances, while the experimental results also show the feasibility of quantum-driven hyperspectral super-resolution. This creates a door for solving other advanced challenging inverse problems via quantum feature information extraction and processing.
Quantum science just winning the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics must lead future development of remote sensing technologies. However, given the very limited number of entangled quantum bits (qubits) even in the most advanced quantum computers, is processing remotely sensed hyperspectral image (featured by its large data volume) using quantum computer technically feasible? Even if the quantum image state can be well processed to the quantum state of the target image (QSTI), it cannot be perfectly retrieved/output as the QSTI will collapse to some eigenstate once it is measured. Owing to these challenges, current quantum image processing technologies can only achieve classification-level applications requiring just a few output qubits. We design a hyperspectral quantum deep network (HyperQUEEN) to encode the hyperspectral information using very few qubits, as well as to learn the mapping from some measuring statistics (associated with the collapsed-QSTI) to the target image (instead of directly retrieving the unobservable QSTI), thereby solving the challenges. HyperQUEEN is the first quantum architecture that makes a breakthrough to blindly reconstruct NASA’s damaged hyperspectral images, which means a lot for the upcoming space era. As the immature quantum facility nowadays does not yet allow us to fully exhibit its high potential, we are not aiming at developing state-of-the-art methods, but are demonstrating the feasibility of quantum hyperspectral remote sensing. Mathematical analysis guiding our design toward the low-rank quantum deep network, together with comprehensive experiments, will also be reported.
Considering that there are many NP-hard problems in remote sensing (e.g., Craig simplex computation in hyperspectral un-mixing), it is natural to introduce quantum computing into space remote sensing. However, current quantum computers have some practical limitations, requiring complementary techniques to support quantum computing. Specifically, we are introducing artificial intelligence (AI) to solve the quantum collapse effect and the phenomenon of insufficient quantum bits (qubits). We thereby propose the hyperspectral quantum deep network (HyperQUEEN) for satellite remote sensing. HyperQUEEN is the first quantum technology that successfully outputs a complete hyperspectral image, given the very limited qubit resources. Existing quantum image processing methods can only achieve classification-level tasks or simple geometry transforms, and are far from being applicable to advanced satellite missions like restoration of damaged hyperspectral images, which HyperQUEEN has successfully achieved for the first time. Remarkable computational efficiency and restoration performances achieved by the radically new quantum AI system—HyperQUEEN—will be reported.
Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is a critical task in the field of remote sensing. Existing deep learning models have made significant progress in HSI classification, but often suffer from parameter redundancy and insufficient noise robustness when handling the high-dimensional nonlinear spatial-spectral information. Recently, quantum computing have garnered significant attention in modeling higher-order correlations with remarkable parameter efficiency. Inspired by this, we propose a QUantum-Enhanced nEural Network (QueenNet) for HSI classification. QueenNet comprises three primary modules, including Quantum Encoding (QE), Quantum Convolution (QC), and Quantum Measurement (QM). Specifically, QE maps HSI into an hyper high-dimensional Hilbert space, encoding it as a quantum states. QC performs HSI feature extraction and transformation using quantum circuits composed of parameterized quantum gate sequences, which effectively enhances the model's ability to capture joint spatial-spectral features while suppressing spectral noise. QM introduces nonlinear feature extraction operations and decodes the HSI features of quantum states back into classic interpretable probability distributions for classification. QueenNet effectively alleviate the limitations of existing HSI classification deep learning models by leveraging the high-dimensional feature representation advantages of quantum computing, introducing a novel paradigm to HSI classification. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that QueenNet achieves an order-of-magnitude reduction in model parameters while surpassing the classification performance of state-of-the-art methods.
Recent advancements in Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR) using deep learning have significantly improved image restoration quality. However, the high computational cost of processing high-resolution images due to the large number of parameters in classical models, along with the scalability challenges of quantum algorithms for image processing, remains a major obstacle. In this paper, we propose the Quantum Image Enhancement Transformer for Super-Resolution (QUIET-SR), a hybrid framework that extends the Swin transformer architecture with a novel shifted quantum window attention mechanism, built upon variational quantum neural networks. QUIET-SR effectively captures complex residual mappings between low-resolution and high-resolution images, leveraging quantum attention mechanisms to enhance feature extraction and image restoration while requiring a minimal number of qubits, making it suitable for the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. We evaluate our framework in MNIST (30.24 PSNR, 0.989 SSIM), FashionMNIST (29.76 PSNR, 0.976 SSIM) and the MedMNIST dataset collection, demonstrating that QUIET-SR achieves PSNR and SSIM scores comparable to state-of-the-art methods while using fewer parameters. Our efficient batching strategy directly enables massive parallelization on multiple QPU's paving the way for practical quantum-enhanced image super-resolution through coordinated QPU-GPU quantum supercomputing.
If you read that quantum machine learning applications solve some traditional machine learning problems at an amazing speed, be sure to check if they return quantum results. Quantum outputs, such as magnitude-encoded vectors, limit the use of applications and require additional specifications on how to extract practical and useful results. In satellite images, degradation of image contrast and color quality is a common problem, which brings great difficulties for information extraction and visibility of image objects. This is due to atmospheric conditions, which can cause a loss of color and contrast in the image. Regardless of the band, image enhancement plays a vital role in presenting details more clearly. The research includes new computational algorithms that accelerate multispectral satellite imagery to improve land cover mapping and study feature extraction. The first method is a quantum Fourier transform algorithm based on quantum computing, and the second method is a parallel modified data algorithm based on parallel computing. These calculation algorithms are applied to multispectral images for improvement. The quantum-processed image is compared with the original image, and better results are obtained in terms of visual interpretation of the extracted information. Quantitatively evaluate the performance of the improved method and evaluate the applicability of the improved technology to different land types.
Deep Learning (DL) is one of many successful methodologies to extract informative patterns and insights from ever increasing noisy large-scale datasets (in our case, satellite images). However, DL models consist of a few thousand to millions of training parameters, and these training parameters require tremendous amount of electrical power for extracting informative patterns from noisy large-scale datasets (e.g., computationally expensive). Hence, we employ a quantum-inspired tensor network for compressing trainable parameters of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) in Earth science. PINNs are DL models penalized by enforcing the law of physics; in particular, the law of physics is embedded in DL models. In addition, we apply tensor decomposition to HyperSpectral Images (HSIs) to improve their spectral resolution. A quantum-inspired tensor network is also the native formulation to efficiently represent and train quantum machine learning models on big datasets on GPU tensor cores. Furthermore, the key contribution of this paper is twofold: (I) we reduced a number of trainable parameters of PINNs by using a quantum-inspired tensor network, and (II) we improved the spectral resolution of remotely-sensed images by employing tensor decomposition. As a benchmark PDE, we solved Burger’s equation. As practical satellite data, we employed HSIs of Indian Pine, USA and of Pavia University, Italy.