Shipping inspection trial of quantum machine learning toward sustainable quantum factory

Abstract

In recent years, the diversification of consumer values has led to an increase in the number of small-quantity, high-mix products. For many manufacturing companies, shipping inspections of such products are of great importance. As all products have the same value, good and defective products need to be efficiently identified. Now, a promising future application of quantum technology is considered to be quantum machine learning. We believe that the quantum classifier for SVMs using quantum kernels is one of the areas where quantum advantages can be demonstrated. At present, there are few examples of quantum classifiers applied to real problems in manufacturing processes. In this study, we aim to build a classifier that can demonstrate the quantum advantage and compare SVMs using classical and quantum kernels with conventional ResNet. Initially, a binarised image was generated after image pre-processing. After principal component analysis and dimensionality reduction were performed on the images, SVM with kernels was carried out. The kernel-based SVMs was then compared with the conventionally implemented Residual neural network (ResNet) using an evaluation index: F1-score. The results showed that the F1-score of SVMs using classical kernels was equivalent to that of Resnet. In addition, SVMs using quantum kernels showed higher F1-score than ResNet. In addition, the impact of the feature map and principal components of the quantum kernel was also investigated. It was found that when the feature map became more complex, conversely, circuit generation took more time. It was also found that the principal components are highly relevant to the image and cannot lead to simple results. In the future, we plan to accumulate more experimental data, look for scenes where quantum machine learning can be used and apply it to the manufacturing field.