
Parameterized Quantum Circuits as Feature Maps: Representation Quality and Readout Effects in Multispectral Land-Cover Classification
Variational quantum classifiers show promise as feature extractors for satellite imagery analysis, but a rigorous benchmark against classical methods reveals a nuanced picture. When quantum circuits function purely as nonlinear embeddings paired with linear readout, they underperform established techniques like RBF-SVM. However, redeploying the same trained quantum representation within a kernel framework recovers significant gains, suggesting the bottleneck lies in readout strategy rather than feature quality. This finding matters for quantum ML practitioners: it decouples representation learning from inference architecture and hints that quantum advantage in remote sensing may depend less on circuit design than on downstream exploitation of learned embeddings.52




























