QDS-SNN: Energy-efficient Quantum Deeply-Supervised Spiking Neural Network Algorithm for Traffic Sign Recognition

Traffic sign recognition is crucial for intelligent transportation and autonomous driving, as it can improve driving efficiency and ensure road safety. However, traditional recognition methods are based on large datasets and intensive computation, which limits their real-time applicability. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a biologically inspired, energy-efficient alternative due to their spatiotemporal processing capabilities, but suffer from information loss and vanishing gradients during training. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a Quantum Deep-supervised Spiking Neural Network (QDS-SNN) that integrates Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) for efficient, low-power deep supervision. Using quantum superposition and entanglement, QNNs enable expressive representations and parallel computation, thereby enhancing performance without compromising energy efficiency. The proposed QDS-SNN incorporates a temporally and spatially adaptive LIF (TSA-LIF) neuron and a quantum-assisted classifier module (QACM) to mitigate gradient issues and improve training effectiveness. This study conducts experiments on the PennyLane quantum simulation platform, and the results show that QDS-SNN achieves 99.72% accuracy on the GTSRB dataset in only 6 time steps—outperforming the MS-ResNet baseline by 1.32% while reducing energy consumption by 55.77%. In the TSRD dataset, it achieves 97.90% accuracy while reducing energy use to 52.68% of the baseline. These results demonstrate that QDS-SNN offers a high-performance, energy-efficient solution for traffic sign recognition in intelligent transportation systems.