Security Technologies Could Benefit From Advances in Quantum Image Processing

Quantum image processing (QIP), an emerging area, extends conventional image processing tasks and operations to the quantum computing framework. Researchers from Changchun University of Science and Technology, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University and NetMile Inc. believe that QIP could be used to build more secure, efficient and advanced technologies for cryptography and information hiding.

Optics-based quantum imaging applications focus on devising novel techniques for optical imaging and parallel information processing at the quantum level by exploiting the quantum nature of light and the instrinsic parallelism of optical signals.

Advances in QIP-based security technologies include quantum watermarking, quantum image encryption and quantum image steganography.

Watermarking and Authentication of Quantum Images (WaQI) is a technique based on using a cover and watermark image pair to produce a watermark embedding circuit that is used to randomly hide the watermark inside the carrier image. This circuit is reversed to recover the original (unmarked) image during the copyright ownership validation.

One possible strategy for quantum image steganography is a Moiré pattern-based NEQR image designed to hide a binary image into a grayscale image. The embedding algorithm would begin with the choice of an initial Moiré grating, such as a stochastic image, as the cover image. The initial Moiré grating would then be modified according to the secret image, and the deformed Moiré grating regarded as the Moiré pattern. Finally, the Moiré pattern would be altered to obtain the stego image.

The researchers believe that efforts to realize the quantum version of a digital image processing application should be focused on areas and applications where the gains from quantum computation can be exploited. They further believe that it is important to exploit the interdisciplinary nature of quantum computation for improved synergy among researchers with interests in the physics, optics, computer science and engineering aspects of quantum computation. The research was published in the International Journal of Quantum Information (doi: 10.1142/S0219749917300017).