Image compression using quantum wavelet transforms
Sri Harshavardhan Reddy Devarapalli, Harshdeep Jadhav, Jayasri Dontabhaktuni · 2025
Quantum computing has emerged as a revolutionary paradigm in numerous fields owing to its basis in quantum mechanical concepts such as quantum entanglement and parallelism. This has potential in various applications including computer vision, particularly, image processing and compression. Applications that depend on largescale image data for storing, processing, and transmission have to rely on compression methods for real-time processing. While the classical methods based on discrete cosine transformations (DCT used in JPEG) and discrete wavelet transformations (DWT) perform image compression efficiently, they suffer from trade-off between loss-less compression and compression ratios. In the current work, we would like to explore the usefulness of implementing quantum wavelet transforms for image compression for better PSNR values and execution times. We compare the application of quantum Haar wavelet transform (QHWT) with different quantum encoding methods such as NASS and FRQI and find that NASS-encoded images on application of QHWT gives better PSNR values and shorter runtime with visibly closer details to the original images, showcasing potential for efficient and faster image compression methods.