Quantum-Driven Multihead Inland Waterbody Detection With Transformer-Encoded CYGNSS Delay-Doppler Map Data

Inland waterbody detection (IWD) is critical for water resources management and agricultural planning. However, the development of high-fidelity IWD mapping technology remains unresolved. We aim to propose a practical solution based on the easily accessible data, i.e., the delay-Doppler map (DDM) provided by NASA's Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), which facilitates effective estimation of physical parameters on the Earth's surface with high temporal resolution and wide spatial coverage. Specifically, as quantum deep network (QUEEN) has revealed its strong proficiency in addressing classification-like tasks, we encode the DDM using a customized transformer, followed by feeding the transformer-encoded DDM (tDDM) into a highly entangled QUEEN to distinguish whether the tDDM corresponds to a hydrological region. In recent literature, QUEEN has achieved outstanding performances in numerous challenging remote sensing tasks (e.g., hyperspectral restoration, change detection, and mixed noise removal, etc.), and its high effectiveness stems from the fundamentally different way it adopts to extract features (the so-called quantum unitary-computing features). The meticulously designed IWD-QUEEN retrieves high-precision river textures, such as those in Amazon River Basin in South America, demonstrating its superiority over traditional classification methods and existing global hydrography maps. IWD-QUEEN, together with its parallel quantum multihead scheme, works in a near-real-time manner (i.e., millisecond-level computing per DDM). To broaden accessibility for users of traditional computers, we also provide the non-quantum counterpart of our method, called IWD-Transformer, thereby increasing the impact of this work.

PRIME: Blind Multispectral Unmixing Using Virtual Quantum Prism and Convex Geometry

Multispectral unmixing (MU) is critical due to the inevitable mixed pixel phenomenon caused by the limited spatial resolution of typical multispectral images in remote sensing. However, MU mathematically corresponds to the underdetermined blind source separation problem, thus highly challenging, preventing researchers from tackling it. Previous MU works all ignore the underdetermined issue, and merely consider scenarios with more bands than sources. This work attempts to resolve the underdetermined issue by further conducting the light-splitting task using a network-inspired virtual prism, and as this task is challenging, we achieve so by incorporating the very advanced quantum feature extraction techniques. We emphasize that the prism is virtual (allowing us to fix the spectral response as a simple deterministic matrix), so the virtual hyperspectral image (HSI) it generates has no need to correspond to some real hyperspectral sensor; in other words, it is good enough as long as the virtual HSI satisfies some fundamental properties of light splitting (e.g., non-negativity and continuity). With the above virtual quantum prism, we know that the virtual HSI is expected to possess some desired simplex structure. This allows us to adopt the convex geometry to unmix the spectra, followed by downsampling the pure spectra back to the multispectral domain, thereby achieving MU. Experimental evidence shows great potential of our MU algorithm, termed as prism-inspired multispectral endmember extraction (PRIME).