Physics Commons^™

Deploying A Quantum Annealing Processor To Detect Tree Cover In Aerial Imagery Of California, Edward Boyda, Saikat Basu, Sangram Ganguly, Andrew Michaelis, Supratik Mukhopadhyay, Ramakrishna R. Nemani

School of Science Faculty Works

Quantum annealing is an experimental and potentially breakthrough computational technology for handling hard optimization problems, including problems of computer vision. We present a case study in training a production-scale classifier of tree cover in remote sensing imagery, using early-generation quantum annealing hardware built by D-wave Systems, Inc. Beginning within a known boosting framework, we train decision stumps on texture features and vegetation indices extracted from four-band, one-meter-resolution aerial imagery from the state of California. We then impose a regulated quadratic training objective to select an optimal voting subset from among these stumps. The votes of the subset define the classifier. …