Volcanic Clouds Detection through QCNN and Geostationary Satellite Multispectral Imagery

Recent advances in quantum computing are opening new possibilities for Earth Observation (EO) data analysis. Quantum machine learning (QML) approaches offer novel ways to process information by exploiting quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement. These capabilities have motivated the exploration of whether quantum-enhanced models can address long-standing challenges in satellite remote sensing, where complex spectral and spatial signals often require sophisticated feature extraction. Among various fields of application, EO data allow the global monitoring of volcanic clouds and are crucial for aviation safety, hazard assessment, real-time eruption response, and evaluation of volcanic impacts on climate. Yet accurate detection of volcanic clouds remains difficult due to their similarity with meteorological clouds, the variability of eruption signatures, and the coarse spectral sampling of geostationary sensors. In this work, the potential of hybrid quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) for the classification of satellite images containing volcanic clouds was investigated. These architectures integrate quantum computational layers into a classical convolutional framework. Two QCNN variants (with 2 and 4 qubits) have been considered to evaluate their ability to classify a dataset of SEVIRI images, including scenes with volcanic clouds (composed of ash, SO2, or mixed components) as well as non-volcanic backgrounds. Finally, the performance of the hybrid QCNN models was compared with that of purely classical architectures.