# HQF-Net: A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Multi-Scale Fusion Network for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06066/) (2024)
- [Scaling Vision with Sparse Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05974/) (2021)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11605/) (2021)
- [UNetFormer: A UNet-like Transformer for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Urban Scene Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08937/) (2021)
- [Absence of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02966/) (2020)
- [OpenEarthMap: A Benchmark Dataset for Global High-Resolution Land Cover Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10732/) (2022)
- [A Novel Transformer Based Semantic Segmentation Scheme for Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12137/) (2021)
- [LandCover.ai: Dataset for Automatic Mapping of Buildings, Woodlands, Water and Roads from Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02264/) (2020)
- [On Circuit-based Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks for Remote Sensing Imagery Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09484/) (2021)
- [Quantum Machine Learning: A Hands-on Tutorial for Machine Learning Practitioners and Researchers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01146/) (2025)
- [Semantic Segmentation for Urban Planning Maps based on U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10862/) (2018)
- [SeasoNet: A Seasonal Scene Classification, segmentation and Retrieval dataset for satellite Imagery over Germany](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09507/) (2022)
- [QuFeX: Quantum feature extraction module for hybrid quantum-classical deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13165/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [HQ-UNet: A Hybrid Quantum-Classical U-Net with a Quantum Bottleneck for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27206/) (2026)
- [Quantum Feature Pyramid Gating for Seismic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15370/) (2026)
- [HQ-JEPA: Hybrid Quantum Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Cross-Modal Remote Sensing Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31068/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Remote sensing semantic segmentation requires models that can jointly capture fine spatial details and high-level semantic context across complex scenes. While classical encoder-decoder architectures such as U-Net remain strong baselines, they often struggle to fully exploit global semantics and structured feature interactions. In this work, we propose HQF-Net, a hybrid quantum-classical multi-scale fusion network for remote sensing image segmentation. HQF-Net integrates multi-scale semantic guidance from a frozen DINOv3 ViT-L/16 backbone with a customized U-Net architecture through a Deformable Multiscale Cross-Attention Fusion (DMCAF) module. To enhance feature refinement, the framework further introduces quantum-enhanced skip connections (QSkip) and a Quantum bottleneck with Mixture-of-Experts (QMoE), which combines complementary local, global, and directional quantum circuits within an adaptive routing mechanism. Experiments on three remote sensing benchmarks show consistent improvements with the proposed design. HQF-Net achieves 0.8568 mIoU and 96.87% overall accuracy on LandCover.ai, 71.82% mIoU on OpenEarthMap, and 55.28% mIoU with 99.37% overall accuracy on SeasoNet. An architectural ablation study further confirms the contribution of each major component. These results show that structured hybrid quantum-classical feature processing is a promising direction for improving remote sensing semantic segmentation under near-term quantum constraints.