Parameterized Quantum Circuits as Feature Maps: Representation Quality and Readout Effects in Multispectral Land-Cover Classification

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2604.26675v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate variational quantum classifiers (VQCs) for land-cover classification from multispectral satellite imagery, adopting a feature-map perspective in which the quantum circuit defines a nonlinear data embedding while the readout determines how this representation is exploited. Using the EuroSAT-MS dataset, we perform a systematic one-vs-one evaluation across all class pairs under a controlled experimental protocol, comparing classical baselines (logistic regression, SVMs, neural networks) with VQCs employing both linear readout and quantum-kernel SVM strategies. Our results show that, while VQCs with linear readout do not outperform strong classical baselines such as RBF-SVM, the same trained quantum feature map can signif