Practical Evaluation of Quantum Kernel Methods for Radar Micro-Doppler Classification on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) Hardware

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Main Authors: Agnihotri, Vikas, Kaur, Jasleen, Kaushik, Sarvagya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Agnihotri, Vikas
Kaur, Jasleen
Kaushik, Sarvagya
author_facet Agnihotri, Vikas
Kaur, Jasleen
Kaushik, Sarvagya
contents This paper examines the application of a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) for radarbased aerial target classification using micro-Doppler signatures. Classical features are extracted and reduced via Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to enable efficient quantum encoding. The reduced feature vectors are embedded into a quantum kernel-induced feature space using a fully entangled ZZFeatureMap and classified using a kernel based QSVM. Performance is first evaluated on a quantum simulator and subsequently validated on NISQ-era superconducting quantum hardware, specifically the IBM Torino (133-qubit) and IBM Fez (156-qubit) processors. Experimental results demonstrate that the QSVM achieves competitive classification performance relative to classical SVM baselines while operating on substantially reduced feature dimensionality. Hardware experiments reveal the impact of noise and decoherence and measurement shot count on quantum kernel estimation, and further show improved stability and fidelity on newer Heron r2 architecture. This study provides a systematic comparison between simulator-based and hardware-based QSVM implementations and highlights both the feasibility and current limitations of deploying quantum kernel methods for practical radar signal classification tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22194
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Practical Evaluation of Quantum Kernel Methods for Radar Micro-Doppler Classification on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) Hardware
Agnihotri, Vikas
Kaur, Jasleen
Kaushik, Sarvagya
Quantum Physics
Artificial Intelligence
This paper examines the application of a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) for radarbased aerial target classification using micro-Doppler signatures. Classical features are extracted and reduced via Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to enable efficient quantum encoding. The reduced feature vectors are embedded into a quantum kernel-induced feature space using a fully entangled ZZFeatureMap and classified using a kernel based QSVM. Performance is first evaluated on a quantum simulator and subsequently validated on NISQ-era superconducting quantum hardware, specifically the IBM Torino (133-qubit) and IBM Fez (156-qubit) processors. Experimental results demonstrate that the QSVM achieves competitive classification performance relative to classical SVM baselines while operating on substantially reduced feature dimensionality. Hardware experiments reveal the impact of noise and decoherence and measurement shot count on quantum kernel estimation, and further show improved stability and fidelity on newer Heron r2 architecture. This study provides a systematic comparison between simulator-based and hardware-based QSVM implementations and highlights both the feasibility and current limitations of deploying quantum kernel methods for practical radar signal classification tasks.
title Practical Evaluation of Quantum Kernel Methods for Radar Micro-Doppler Classification on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) Hardware
topic Quantum Physics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22194