Nonnegative/Binary Matrix Factorization for Image Classification using Quantum Annealing

Classical computing has borne witness to the development of machine learning. The integration of quantum technology into this mix will lead to unimaginable benefits and be regarded as a giant leap forward in mankind's ability to compute. Demonstrating the benefits of this integration now becomes essential. With the advance of quantum computing, several machine-learning techniques have been proposed that use quantum annealing. In this study, we implement a matrix factorization method using quantum annealing for image classification and compare the performance with traditional machine-learning methods. Nonnegative/binary matrix factorization (NBMF) was originally introduced as a generative model, and we propose a multiclass classification model as an application. We extract the features of handwritten digit images using NBMF and apply them to solve the classification problem. Our findings show that when the amount of data, features, and epochs is small, the accuracy of models trained by NBMF is superior to classical machine-learning methods, such as neural networks. Moreover, we found that training models using a quantum annealing solver significantly reduces computation time. Under certain conditions, there is a benefit to using quantum annealing technology with machine learning.

Image Analysis Based on Nonnegative/Binary Matrix Factorization

Using nonnegative/binary matrix factorization (NBMF), a matrix can be decomposed into a nonnegative matrix and a binary matrix. Our analysis of facial images, based on NBMF and using the Fujitsu Digital Annealer, leads to successful image reconstruction and image classification. The NBMF algorithm converges in fewer iterations than those required for the convergence of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), although both techniques perform comparably in image classification.