19–21 Nov 2025
Jagiellonian University
Europe/Warsaw timezone

Quantum Difffusion Models in Earth Observation

21 Nov 2025, 10:30
30m
H-0-11 (Jagiellonian University)

H-0-11

Jagiellonian University

Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science, Jagiellonian University, ul. prof. Stanisława Łojasiewicza 11, 30-348 Kraków

Speaker

Francesco Mauro

Description

Quantum diffusion models are rapidly advancing generative remote-sensing analytics by harnessing quantum computation to deliver higher-quality, more realistic satellite images, while converging faster and with substantially fewer trainable parameters than comparable classical diffusers. In this context, we first realise a fully-quantum latent diffusion model (QLDM) whose denoiser is a variational-quantum circuit acting on a 10-dimensionaI latent code. On EuroSAT, focusing on three land-cover classes Forest, Herbaceous Vegetation and SeaLake, QLDM lowers the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and Kernel Inception Distance (KID) by 21.5 % and 29.9 %, respectively, relative to a parameter-matched classical latent diffuser. Yet the severe spatial compression intrinsic to latent processing limits fine-grained detail. To restore image fidelity, we develop a hybrid quantum-classical architecture, the Quanvolutional Conditioned U-Net (QCU-Net), which inserts entangling quantum layers both at the U-Net bottleneck and as a quanvolutional filter early in the encoder. Trained on the full ten-class EuroSAT RGB set, QCU-Net reaches an FID of 2.57 and a KID of 0.0008, representing 64 % and 76 % improvements over the best classical diffusion baseline (FID = 7.22; KID = 0.0034), and boosts class-conditioning accuracy to 81.7 % versus 62.2 % for the classical model. Thèse gains confirm that embedding quantum circuits within the feature-extraction pipeline yields richer spatial-spectral representations than latent-space quantum processing alone.

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