Quantum-enhanced ghost imaging recognition via joint optimization of speckle patterns and quantum network parameters

Abstract

Ghost imaging enables nonlocal image reconstruction and exhibits strong robustness against interference, but achieving high-fidelity recognition at ultra-low sampling rates remains challenging. Quantum machine learning offers a novel approach for efficient feature extraction on noisy medium-scale quantum devices; however, existing methods generally suffer from low recognition accuracy and weak noise resistance. This paper proposes a ghost imaging recognition method based on the simultaneous optimization of speckle patterns and quantum network parameters. By leveraging the mathematical equivalence between classical convolution and speckle-object dot product operations in ghost imaging, a speckle consistency regularization mechanism is introduced to achieve end-to-end joint optimization of optical coding and quantum feature extractors. A parallel 8-qubit quantum circuit employing block coding and a star-shaped entanglement structure is designed to extract higher-order features from bucket signals. Simulation results on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets show that at an ultra-low sampling rate of 1.5625%, the proposed framework achieves recognition accuracies of 90.1% and 81.7%, respectively, representing a 2.6% improvement over classical convolutional neural networks and a maximum improvement of 14.2% over traditional hybrid quantum machine learning models. This method also exhibits strong robustness to quantum noise and has been validated on a real optical ghost imaging system, achieving an average recognition accuracy of 84.8%. These results confirm that the joint optimization of speckle patterns and quantum network parameters provides a reliable and practical solution for low-sampling ghost imaging recognition.