Quantum Support Vector Regression for Biophysical Variable Estimation in Remote Sensing

Regression analysis has a crucial role in many Earth Ob-servation (EO) applications. The increasing availability and recent development of new computing technologies moti-vate further research to expand the capabilities and enhance the performance of data analysis algorithms. In this paper, the biophysical variable estimation problem is addressed. A novel approach is proposed, which consists in a reformulated Support Vector Regression (SVR) and leverages Quantum Annealing (QA). In particular, the SVR optimization prob-lem is reframed to a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Opti-mization (QUBO) problem. The algorithm is then tested on the D-Wave Advantage quantum annealer. The experiments presented in this paper show good results, despite current hardware limitations, suggesting that this approach is viable and has great potential.