Abstract
Exploiting the promise of security and efficiency that quantum computing offers, the basic foundations leading to commercial applications for quantum image processing are proposed. Two mathematical frameworks and algorithms to accomplish the watermarking of quantum images, authentication of ownership of already watermarked images and recovery of their unmarked versions on quantum computers are proposed. Encoding the images as 2(n)-sized normalised Flexible Representation of Quantum Images (FRQI) states, with n-qubits and 1-qubit dedicated to capturing the respective information about the colour and position of every pixel in the image respectively, the proposed algorithms utilise the flexibility inherent to the FRQI representation, in order to confine the transformations on an image to any predetermined chromatic or spatial ( or a combination of both) content of the image as dictated by the watermark embedding, authentication or recovery circuits. Furthermore, by adopting an apt generalisation of the criteria required to realise physical quantum computing hardware, three standalone components that make up the framework to prepare, manipulate and recover the various contents required to represent and produce movies on quantum computers are also proposed. Each of the algorithms and the mathematical foundations for their execution were simulated using classical (i.e., conventional or non-quantum) computing resources, and their results were analysed alongside other longstanding classical computing equivalents. The work presented here, combined together with the extensions suggested, provide the basic foundations towards effectuating secure and efficient classical-like image and video processing applications on the quantum-computing framework.