Quantum Image Classification on NISQ Devices

Quantum computing is an emerging computing field that is expected to make a huge impact on several scopes of science and technology. In this paper, we investigate the role of quantum computing in image classification, as an important branch of machine learning with widely used applications in healthcare, military, and IR4.0. In particular, we systemically compare the performance of two well-known classical image classification systems, i.e., Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Convolutions Neural Network (CNN), with equivalent quantum image classification algorithms, i.e., Quantum Support Vector Machine (Q-SVM) and Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (Q-CNN). Both quantum and classical algorithms are implemented on available Noisy-Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices using MNIST dataset. Performance of models were compared regarding accuracy and training time. The results show that classical algorithms outperform the quantum algorithms for the given tasks. However, we observe that large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing can effectively perform image classification tasks in the future.