Maritime object classification with SAR imagery using quantum kernel methods

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Tanner, John, Davies, Nicholas, Elahi, Pascal Jahan, Myers, Casey R., Huynh, Du, Liu, Wei, Reynolds, Mark, Wang, Jingbo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Tanner, John
Davies, Nicholas
Elahi, Pascal Jahan
Myers, Casey R.
Huynh, Du
Liu, Wei
Reynolds, Mark
Wang, Jingbo
author_facet Tanner, John
Davies, Nicholas
Elahi, Pascal Jahan
Myers, Casey R.
Huynh, Du
Liu, Wei
Reynolds, Mark
Wang, Jingbo
contents Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing causes global economic losses of 10-25 billion USD annually and undermines marine sustainability and governance. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides reliable maritime surveillance under all weather and lighting conditions, but classifying small maritime objects in SAR imagery remains challenging. We investigate quantum machine learning for this task, focusing on quantum kernel methods (QKMs) applied to real and complex SAR chips extracted from the SARFish dataset. We tackle two binary classification problems, the first for distinguishing vessels from non-vessels, and the second for distinguishing fishing vessels from other types of vessels. We compare QKMs applied to real and complex SAR chips against classical Laplacian, RBF, and linear kernels applied to real SAR chips. We restrict the comparison to be between just kernel based models so that the comparison is as fair and meaningful as possible. Using noiseless numerical simulations of the quantum kernels, we find that with the real SAR chips, QKMs are capable of obtaining equal or better performance than the classical kernels in the best case. However, the specific quantum kernel used to encode the complex SAR data overfits and performs poorly. This work presents the first application of QKMs to maritime classification in SAR imagery and offers insight into the potential and current limitations of quantum-enhanced learning for maritime surveillance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Maritime object classification with SAR imagery using quantum kernel methods
Tanner, John
Davies, Nicholas
Elahi, Pascal Jahan
Myers, Casey R.
Huynh, Du
Liu, Wei
Reynolds, Mark
Wang, Jingbo
Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing causes global economic losses of 10-25 billion USD annually and undermines marine sustainability and governance. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides reliable maritime surveillance under all weather and lighting conditions, but classifying small maritime objects in SAR imagery remains challenging. We investigate quantum machine learning for this task, focusing on quantum kernel methods (QKMs) applied to real and complex SAR chips extracted from the SARFish dataset. We tackle two binary classification problems, the first for distinguishing vessels from non-vessels, and the second for distinguishing fishing vessels from other types of vessels. We compare QKMs applied to real and complex SAR chips against classical Laplacian, RBF, and linear kernels applied to real SAR chips. We restrict the comparison to be between just kernel based models so that the comparison is as fair and meaningful as possible. Using noiseless numerical simulations of the quantum kernels, we find that with the real SAR chips, QKMs are capable of obtaining equal or better performance than the classical kernels in the best case. However, the specific quantum kernel used to encode the complex SAR data overfits and performs poorly. This work presents the first application of QKMs to maritime classification in SAR imagery and offers insight into the potential and current limitations of quantum-enhanced learning for maritime surveillance.
title Maritime object classification with SAR imagery using quantum kernel methods
topic Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11367