Quantum Image Processing: Opportunities and Challenges

Quantum image processing (QIP) is a research branch of quantum information and quantum computing. It studies how to take advantage of quantum mechanics’ properties to represent images in a quantum computer and then, based on that image format, implement various image operations. Due to the quantum parallel computing derived from quantum state superposition and entanglement, QIP has natural advantages over classical image processing. But some related works misuse the notion of quantum superiority and mislead the research of QIP, which leads to a big controversy. In this paper, after describing this field’s research status, we list and analyze the doubts about QIP and argue “quantum image classification and recognition” would be the most significant opportunity to exhibit the real quantum superiority. We present the reasons for this judgment and dwell on the challenges for this opportunity in the era of NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum).