Hybrid Classical-Quantum architecture for vectorised image classification of hand-written sketches

Abstract: Quantum machine learning (QML) investigates how quantum phenomena can be exploited in order to learn data in an alternative way, \textit{e.g.} by means of a quantum computer. While recent results evidence that QML models can potentially surpass their classical counterparts' performance in specific tasks, quantum technology hardware is still unready to reach quantum advantage in tasks of significant relevance to the broad scope of the computer science community. Recent advances indicate that hybrid classical-quantum models can readily attain competitive performances at low architecture complexities. Such investigations are often carried out for image-processing tasks, and are notably constrained to modelling \textit{raster images}, represented as a grid of two-dimensional pixels. Here, we introduce vector-based representation of sketch drawings as a test-bed for QML models. Such a lower-dimensional data structure results handful to benchmark model's performance, particularly in current transition times, where classical simulations of quantum circuits are naturally limited in the number of qubits, and quantum hardware is not readily available to perform large-scale experiments. We report some encouraging results for primitive hybrid classical-quantum architectures, in a canonical sketch recognition problem.