A Quantum Image Representation Based on Bitplanes

Quantum image representation plays an important role in quantum image processing. In this paper, a bitplane representation of quantum images (BRQI) is proposed, which uses (n+4) or (n+6) qubits to store a grayscale or RGB color image of 2(n) pixels. Compared with a novel enhanced quantum representation (NEQR), and a novel quantum representation of color digital images (NCQI), the storage capacity of BRQI improves 16 times and 2(18) times, respectively. Next, some quantum operations based on BRQI are proposed, these operations including complement of colors, reverse of bitplanes, and translation of bitplanes. Analyzed the implementation circuits of these operations, the result indicates that these operations based on BRQI have lower quantum cost than NEQR and NCQI. Furthermore, an image scrambling algorithm based on BRQI is presented by combining the above operations. Simulation experiments and performance analysis show that proposed scrambling algorithm is effective and efficient.