Explainable Quantum Machine Learning for Multispectral Images Segmentation: Case Study

The emergence of Big Data changed how we approach information systems engineering. Nowadays, when we can use remote sensing techniques for Big Data acquisition, the issues such data introduce are as important as ever. One of those concerns is the processing of the data. Classical methods often fail to address that problem or are incapable of processing the data in a reasonable time. With that in mind information system engineers are required to investigate different approaches to the data processing. The recent advancements in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices implementation allow us to investigate their application to real-life computational problem. This field of study is called quantum (information) systems engineering and usually focuses on technical problems with the contemporary devices. However, hardware challenges are not the only ones that hinder our quantum computation capabilities. Software limitations are the other, less explored side of this medal. Using multispectral image segmentation as a task example, we investigated how difficult it is to run a hybrid quantum-classical model on a real, publicly available quantum device. To quantify how and explain why the performance of our model changed when ran on a real device, we propose new explainability metrics. These metrics introduce new meaning to the explainable quantum machine learning; the explanation of the performance issue comes from the quantum device behavior. We also analyzed the expected money costs of running similar experiment on contemporary quantum devices using standard market prices.