Alessandro Sebastianelli

• Master of Engineering
• Research Fellow at European Space Agency

This paper investigates the optimization properties of hybrid quantum-classical quanvolutional neural networks (QuanvNNs), i.e., hybrid architectures merging quanvolutional layers with classical dense layers. We explore several optimization strategies by assessing 9 optimizers across various configurations of layers and kernel size. Through rigorou...

The introduction of quantum concepts is increasingly making its way into generative machine learning models. However, while there are various implementations of quantum Generative Adversarial Networks, the integration of quantum elements into diffusion models remains an open and challenging task. In this work, we propose a potential version of a qu...

A significant amount of remotely sensed data is generated daily by many Earth observation (EO) spaceborne and airborne sensors over different countries of our planet. Different applications use those data, such as natural hazard monitoring, global climate change, urban planning, and more. Many challenges are brought by the use of these big data in...

Abstract—Coastal water quality monitoring is crucial for environmental sustainability and public health. This work introduces a very cutting-edge methodology, using ΦSat-2 multispectral data and quanvolutional neural networks to explore quantum-enhanced machine learning for water contaminant assessment. By integrating quantum preprocessing into a c...

The significant increase in the amount of satellite data in recent years along with the increase in computing resources has opened up new possibilities for Earth Observation (EO) data analysis. However, the main obstacle to obtaining highquality products is the limited amount of labeled data. Among the methods that can help solve this type of probl...

Quantum computing has introduced novel perspectives for tackling and improving machine learning tasks. Moreover, the integration of quantum technologies together with well-known deep learning (DL) architectures has emerged as a potential research trend gaining attraction across various domains, such as Earth Observation (EO) and many other research...

In this paper, a novel method for data splitting is presented: an iterative procedure divides the input dataset of volcanic eruption, chosen as the proposed use case, into two parts using a dissimilarity index calculated on the cumulative histograms of these two parts. The Cumulative Histogram Dissimilarity (CHD) index is introduced as part of the...

Climate change and increasing droughts pose significant challenges to water resource management around the world. These problems lead to severe water shortages that threaten ecosystems, agriculture, and human communities. To advance the fight against these challenges, we present a new dataset, SEN12-WATER, along with a benchmark using a novel end-t...

Quantum Graph Neural Networks (QGNNs) represent a novel fusion of quantum computing and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), aimed at overcoming the computational and scalability challenges inherent in classical GNNs that are powerful tools for analyzing data with complex relational structures but suffer from limitations such as high computational complex...

In this paper, we propose a new methodology to design quantum hybrid diffusion models, derived from classical U-Nets with ResNet and Attention layers. Specifically, we propose two possible different hybridization schemes combining quantum computing’s superior generalization with classical networks’ modularity. In the first one, we acted at the vert...

A significant amount of remotely sensed data is generated daily by many Earth observation (EO) spaceborne and airborne sensors over different countries of our planet. Different applications use those data, such as natural hazard monitoring, global climate change, urban planning, and more. Many challenges are brought by the use of these big data in...

Climate change is intensifying extreme weather events, causing both water scarcity and severe rainfall unpredictability, and posing threats to sustainable development, biodiversity, and access to water and sanitation. This paper aims to provide valuable insights for comprehensive water resource monitoring under diverse meteorological conditions. An...

Dengue fever, a prevalent and rapidly spreading arboviral disease, poses substantial public health and economic challenges in tropical and sub-tropical regions worldwide. Predicting infectious disease outbreaks on a countrywide scale is complex due to spatiotemporal variations in dengue incidence across administrative areas. To address this, we pro...

Atmospheric pollution has been largely considered by the scientific community as a primary threat to human health and ecosystems, above all for its impact on climate change. Therefore, its containment and reduction are gaining interest and commitment from institutions and researchers, although the solutions are not immediate. It becomes of primary...

COVID-19 had a strong and disruptive impact on our society, and yet further analyses on most relevant factors explaining the spread of the pandemic are needed. Interdisciplinary studies linking epidemiological, mobility, environmental, and socio-demographic data analysis can help understanding how historical conditions, concurrent social policies a...

p>Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is an emerging technology that only recently has begun to take root in the research fields of Earth Observation (EO) and Remote Sensing (RS), and whose state of the art is roughly divided into one group oriented to fully quantum solutions, and in another oriented to hybrid solutions. Very few works applied QML to EO...

p>Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is an emerging technology that only recently has begun to take root in the research fields of Earth Observation (EO) and Remote Sensing (RS), and whose state of the art is roughly divided into one group oriented to fully quantum solutions, and in another oriented to hybrid solutions. Very few works applied QML to EO...

Earlier research has shown that the Normalized Difference Drought Index (NDDI), combining information from both NDVI and NDMI, can be an accurate early indicator of drought conditions. NDDI is computed with information from visible, near-infrared, and short-wave infrared channels, and demonstrates increased sensitivity as a drought indicator than o...

Climate change has caused disruption in certain weather patterns, leading to extreme weather events like flooding and drought in different parts of the world. In this paper, we propose machine learning methods for analyzing changes in water resources over a time period of six years, by focusing on lakes and rivers in Italy and Spain. Additionally,...

Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is an emerging technology that only recently has begun to take root in the research fields of Earth Observation (EO) and Remote Sensing (RS), and whose state of the art is roughly divided into one group oriented to fully quantum solutions, and in another oriented to hybrid solutions. Very few works applied QML to EO t...

In recent years, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have become widespread in all the fields of Remote Sensing (RS) and Earth Observation (EO). This has allowed the rapid development of new procedures to solve problems affecting these sectors. In this context, this work aims at presenting a novel method for filtering speckle noise from Sentinel-1 Gro...

In recent years, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have become widespread in all the fields of Remote Sensing (RS) and Earth Observation (EO). This has allowed the rapid development of new procedures to solve problems affecting these sectors. In this context, this work aims at presenting a novel method for filtering speckle noise from Sentinel-1 Gro...

In recent years, machine learning algorithms have become widespread in all the fields of remote sensing and earth observation. This has allowed the rapid development of new procedures to solve problems affecting these sectors. In this context, this work aims at presenting a novel method for filtering speckle noise from Sentinel-1 ground range detec...

Cloud removal is a relevant topic in Remote Sensing, fostering medium- and high-resolution optical image usability for Earth monitoring and study. Recent applications of deep generative models and sequence-to-sequence-based models have proved their capability to advance the field significantly. Nevertheless, there are still some gaps: the amount of...

This article aims to investigate how circuit-based hybrid Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) can be successfully employed as image classifiers in the context of remote sensing. The hybrid QCNNs enrich the classical architecture of CNNs by introducing a quantum layer within a standard neural network. The novel QCNN proposed in this work i...

This article aims to investigate how circuit-based hybrid Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) can be successfully employed as image classifiers in the context of remote sensing. The hybrid QCNNs enrich the classical architecture of CNNs by introducing a quantum layer within a standard neural network. The novel QCNN proposed in this work i...

In recent years, the growth of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms has raised the number of studies including their applicability in a variety of different scenarios. Among all, one of the hardest ones is the aerospace, due to its peculiar physical requirements. In this context, a feasibility study, with a prototype of an on board Artificial Intellige...

In this paper, the architecture of an innovative tool, enabling researchers to create in an automatic way suitable datasets for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in the Earth Observation (EO) context, is presented. Two versions of the architecture have been implemented and made available on Git-Hub, with a specific Graphical User Interface...

In recent years, the growth of Machine Learning algorithms in a variety of different applications has raised numerous studies on the applicability of these algorithms in real scenarios. Among all, one of the hardest scenarios, due to its physical requirements, is the aerospace one. In this context, the authors of this work aim to propose a first pr...

The abundance of clouds, located both spatially and temporally, often makes remote sensing applications with optical images difficult or even impossible. In this manuscript, a novel method for clouds-corrupted optical image restoration has been presented and developed, based on a joint data fusion paradigm, where three deep neural networks have bee...

Data fusion is a well-known technique, becoming more and more popular in the Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation (AI4EO) domain mainly due to its ability of reinforcing AI4EO applications by combining multiple data sources and thus bringing better results. On the other hand, like other methods for satellite data analysis, data fusion itse...

In recent years, one of the highest challenges in the field of artificial intelligence has been the creation of systems capable of learning how to play classic games. This paper presents a Deep Q-Learning based approach for playing the Snake game. All the elements of the related Reinforcement Learning framework are defined. Numerical simulations fo...

In recent years, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have become widespread in all fields of Remote Sensing (RS) and Earth Observation (EO). This has allowed a rapid development of new procedures to solve problems affecting these sectors. In this context, the authors of this work aim to present a novel method for filtering the speckle noise from Senti...

This paper presents a novel method of landslide detection by exploiting the Mask R-CNN capability of identifying an object layout by using a pixel-based segmentation, along with transfer learning used to train the proposed model. A data set of 160 elements is created containing landslide and non-landslide images. The proposed method consists of thr...

This concept paper aims to provide a brief outline of quantum computers, explore existing methods of quantum image classification techniques, so focusing on remote sensing applications, and discuss the bottlenecks of performing these algorithms on currently available open source platforms. Initial results demonstrate feasibility. Next steps include...

The aim of this concept paper is the description of a new tool to support institutions in the implementation of targeted countermeasures, based on quantitative and multi-scale elements, for the fight and prevention of emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The tool is a cloud-based centralized system; a multi-user platform that relies...

Dengue fever is one of the most common and rapidly spreading arboviral diseases in the world, with major public health and economic consequences in tropical and sub-tropical regions. Countries such as Peru, 17.143 cases of dengue were reported in 2019, where 81.4% of cases concentrated in five of the 25 departments. When predicting infectious disea...

Aim of this paper is the description of a new tool to support institutions in the implementation of targeted countermeasures, based on quantitative and multi-scale elements, for the fight and prevention of emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The tool is a centralized system (web application), single multi-user platform, which relies...

This paper presents a novel method of landslide detection by exploiting the Mask R-CNN capability of identifying an object layout by using a pixel-based segmentation, along with transfer learning used to train the proposed model. A data set of 160 elements is created containing landslide and non-landslide images. The proposed method consists of thr...

Nowadays the use of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms is spreading in the field of Remote Sensing, with applications ranging from detection and classification of land use and monitoring to the prediction of many natural or anthropic phenomena of interest. One main limit of their employment is related to the need for a huge amount of data for trainin...

In this paper the authors present and validate a procedure, which intends to combine the latest state of the art models in bridge monitoring with freely available satellite data. Through the Differential SAR interferometry (DinSAR) technique, a dataset of displacements for the Morandi bridge in Genoa (Italy), before its collapse, has been created,...

In this paper, the authors aim to combine the latest state of the art models in image recognition with the best publicly available satellite images to create a system for landslide risk mitigation. We focus first on landslide detection and further propose a similar system to be used for prediction. Such models are valuable as they could easily be s...