Fast Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks for Low-Complexity Object Detection in Autonomous Driving Applications

Object detection applications, especially in autonomous driving, have drawn attention due to the advancements in deep learning. Additionally, with continuous improvements in classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs), there has been a notable enhancement in both the efficiency and speed of these applications, making autonomous driving more reliable and effective. However, due to the exponentially rapid growth in the complexity and scale of visual signals used in object detection, there are limitations regarding computation speeds while conducting object detection solely with classical computing. Motivated by this, this paper proposes the quantum object detection engine (QODE), which implements a quantum version of CNN, named QCNN, in object detection. Furthermore, this paper proposes a novel fast quantum convolution algorithm that processes the multi-channel of visual signals based on a small number of qubits and constructs the output channel data, thereby achieving relieved computational complexity. Our QODE, equipped with fast quantum convolution, demonstrates feasibility in object detection with multi-channel data, addressing a limitation of current QCNNs due to the scarcity of qubits in the current era of quantum computing. Moreover, this paper introduces a heterogeneous knowledge distillation training algorithm that enhances the performance of our QODE.