Computation-efficient quantum convolutional neural networks for autonomous driving applications

Computation-efficient quantum convolutional neural networks for autonomous driving applications

연구 분야: Artificial Intelligence

학회: The Journal of Supercomputing

This paper proposes a computation-efficient quantum convolutional neural network (CE-QCNN) architecture designed for autonomous driving applications. A key contribution of this work lies in the formulation of a tri-value qubit encoding (TQE) scheme, which compactly embeds three-channel RGB image data into single-qubit states via a sequence of quantum rotations. This strategy enables significant qubit resource reduction while preserving the representational richness of multi-channel visual inputs. The encoded quantum states are subsequently processed through parameterized quantum circuits for convolutional feature extraction, forming the core of the proposed CE-QCNN framework. To further improve learning stability and early-stage performance, a knowledge distillation (KD) strategy is employed, transferring supervision from a pretrained classical CNN model to the quantum network. The proposed model is evaluated on the KITTI dataset, a standard benchmark for autonomous driving, where it demonstrates both competitive detection accuracy and reduced computational complexity. These results substantiate the scalability and practical applicability of CE-QCNNs for future quantum-enhanced perception systems in real-time autonomous driving scenarios.