Light-Weight Quantum Binary Image Classifier

Machine learning is a powerful tool which, when given the availability of comprehensive datasets, required training iterations and the necessary resources to support them, can achieve impressive results in a variety of classification tasks. In this paper, we put forward a quantum alternative for users that do not posses the ability to gather and store large amounts of data to be used subsequently in lengthy training iterations. A light-weight probabilistic quantum binary classifier can be built by encoding the two chosen class representatives (images) into quantum vectors, such that a Principal Component decomposition can express the differences between them only along one dimension (basis vector). A standard measurement in the computational basis will then project any transformed input sample along one of the two classes. The classifier accepts quantum representations of images as input, which require exponentially fewer number of quantum bits compared with the number of classical bits used to store an image. The technique is illustrated on a "proof of concept" example, in which a quantum character recognizer is built to label any input sample image as either letter {\bf A} or {\bf P}. The quantum classifier can be tuned to "favor" any of the two classes and the measurement probabilities follow closely how far an input sample is from the two class representatives. Despite its relative simplicity, the quantum classifier can distinguish between the standard letter {\bf A} and the standard letter {\bf P} with $98\%$ accuracy. In principle, the procedure can be applied to any image classification task, including gray-scale and color images, as well as classification problems in which an input sample is characterized by a collection of properties given by their values.