Low-depth three-parameter quantum convolutional neural network for image classification

Abstract

Quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) typically consist of quantum encoding, convolution, and pooling layers. However, existing QCNNs for image classification still face two major limitations. Most encoding layers rely on single-parameter angle encoding, which limits their ability to represent complex image features. Many circuit architectures are relatively deep, increasing cir cuit complexity and noise accumulation and thus hindering implementation on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. To address these issues, this paper proposes a low-depth three-parameter encoding quantum convolutional neural network (LTP-QCNN) for image classification. The model employs a three parameter angle encoding layer that maps compressed image features onto the rotation angles of single-qubit gates. A first low-depth quantum convolutional layer is employed to extract local features, followed by a quantum pooling layer for quantum-state dimensionality reduction and information fusion. The pooled quantum states are then processed by a second quantum convolutional layer to extract discriminative features. Finally, the measured quantum feature vector is input into a classical classification layer to produce the final prediction. Simulation experiments were conducted on the Fashion-MNIST, MNIST, and KMNIST benchmark datasets. On Fashion-MNIST, LTP-QCNN achieved an accuracy of 99.85% on binary classification, while the accuracies for five-class and six class tasks reached 90.98% and 89.48%, respectively. The results demonstrate that LTP-QCNN achieves effective and stable image classification under limited quantum resources.