Quantum Vision Clustering

Unsupervised visual clustering has garnered significant attention recently, aiming to characterize distributions of unlabeled visual images through clustering based on a parameterized appearance approach. Alternatively, clustering algorithms can be viewed as assignment problems where an unlabelled sample needs to be assigned into a specific cluster. This problem can be formulated as Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization that is characterized as NP-hard, yet precisely solvable for small instances on contemporary hardware. Adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) emerges as a promising solution to offer a good speed in solving the NP-hard optimization problems. However, existing clustering approaches face challenges in designing the problems to be solved by the quantum computer. In this study, we present the first clustering formulation tailored for resolution using Adiabatic quantum computing. An Ising model is introduced to represent the quantum mechanical system implemented on AQC. The proposed approach demonstrates high competitiveness compared to state-of-the-art optimization-based methods, even when utilizing off-the-shelf integer programming solvers. Lastly, this work showcases the solvability of the proposed clustering problem on current-generation real quantum computers for small examples and analyzes the properties of the obtained solutions.