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Main Authors: Strauss, Joseph, Sharma, Jyotsna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17217
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author Strauss, Joseph
Sharma, Jyotsna
author_facet Strauss, Joseph
Sharma, Jyotsna
contents Marine oil spills require rapid detection to mitigate severe ecological and economic damage. While satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides essential all-weather monitoring, analyzing this data remains challenging. Deep learning models often require massive datasets and incur high latency. To address this, a pixel-wise quantum-assisted Support Vector Machine (QSVM) bagging ensemble is developed. Quantum annealing is leveraged to optimize the support vectors of individual weak SVMs on small data subsets, which are then classically aggregated. The approach is evaluated on Sentinel-1 imagery using both quantum simulation and physical quantum annealing hardware. The quantum-assisted pipeline achieved performance comparable to a rigorous classical baseline, yielding an Intersection-over-Union (IoU) of 0.60 and a balanced accuracy of 0.89. Complementary experiments with gate-based quantum computing demonstrated similar segmentation accuracy, although the annealing approach offered superior inference efficiency. Generalization was further assessed on independent oil spill imagery from the Strait of Hormuz, demonstrating the potential transferability of the trained pipeline to geographically distinct spill events. These results establish the feasibility of quantum-assisted, segmentation pipelines for near-real-time environmental monitoring.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17217
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Near-Real-Time Marine Oil Spill Detection in SAR Imagery using Quantum-Assisted SVM
Strauss, Joseph
Sharma, Jyotsna
Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
Marine oil spills require rapid detection to mitigate severe ecological and economic damage. While satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides essential all-weather monitoring, analyzing this data remains challenging. Deep learning models often require massive datasets and incur high latency. To address this, a pixel-wise quantum-assisted Support Vector Machine (QSVM) bagging ensemble is developed. Quantum annealing is leveraged to optimize the support vectors of individual weak SVMs on small data subsets, which are then classically aggregated. The approach is evaluated on Sentinel-1 imagery using both quantum simulation and physical quantum annealing hardware. The quantum-assisted pipeline achieved performance comparable to a rigorous classical baseline, yielding an Intersection-over-Union (IoU) of 0.60 and a balanced accuracy of 0.89. Complementary experiments with gate-based quantum computing demonstrated similar segmentation accuracy, although the annealing approach offered superior inference efficiency. Generalization was further assessed on independent oil spill imagery from the Strait of Hormuz, demonstrating the potential transferability of the trained pipeline to geographically distinct spill events. These results establish the feasibility of quantum-assisted, segmentation pipelines for near-real-time environmental monitoring.
title Toward Near-Real-Time Marine Oil Spill Detection in SAR Imagery using Quantum-Assisted SVM
topic Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17217