A multimode quantum image representation and its encryption scheme

The research of quantum network will promote the application of quantum image to be more universal and widespread. Quantum image representation model is the basis of quantum image processing. Therefore, we propose a multimode quantum image representation (MQIR) and its preparation. In this representation, the image size can be arbitrary and the color can be in one of several color models, such as Gray, RGB, Lab, HSL. This improves the universality of quantum image applications, and our MQIR requires fewer qubits than other quantum image representations. Furthermore, an MQIR image encryption scheme is presented, which is based on three-dimensional non-equilateral Arnold transformation. We give the MQIR transformation (inverse transformation) algorithm and quantum circuits. Some of the transformation times and the parameters in the scrambling process can be used as the keys in the proposed encryption. Finally, we conduct some simulation experiments on the classical computer to analyze the performance such as histogram analysis, peak signal-to-noise ratio and the correlation coefficients of adjacent pixels between original images and encrypted images. Simulation results show that the proposed quantum image encryption scheme is efficient.