An improved quantum watermarking scheme using small-scale quantum circuits and color scrambling

In order to solve the problem of embedding the watermark into the quantum color image, in this paper, an improved scheme of using small-scale quantum circuits and color scrambling is proposed. Both color carrier image and color watermark image are represented using novel enhanced quantum representation. The image sizes for carrier and watermark are assumed to be \(2^{n+1}\times 2^{n+2}\) and \(2^{n}\times 2^{n}\), respectively. At first, the color of pixels in watermark image is scrambled using the controlled rotation gates, and then, the scrambled watermark with \(2^n\times 2^n\) image size and 24-qubit gray scale is expanded to an image with \(2^{n+1}\times 2^{n+2}\) image size and 3-qubit gray scale. Finally, the expanded watermark image is embedded into the carrier image by the controlled-NOT gates. The extraction of watermark is the reverse process of embedding it into carrier image, which is achieved by applying operations in the reverse order. Simulation-based experimental results show that the proposed scheme is superior to other similar algorithms in terms of three items, visual quality, scrambling effect of watermark image, and noise resistibility.     

A quantum watermarking scheme using simple and small-scale quantum circuits

A new quantum gray-scale image watermarking scheme by using simple and small-scale quantum circuits is proposed. The NEQR representation for quantum images is used. The image sizes for carrier and watermark are assumed to be \(2n \times 2n\) and \(n \times n\), respectively. At first, a classical watermark with \(n \times n\) image size and 8 bits gray scale is expanded to an image with \(2n \times 2n\) image size and 2 bits gray scale. Then the expanded image is scrambled to be a meaningless image by the SWAP gates that controlled by the keys only known to the operator. The scrambled image is embedded into the carrier image by the CNOT gates (XOR operation). The watermark is extracted from the watermarked image by applying operations in the reverse order. Simulation-based experimental results show that our proposed scheme is excellent in terms of three items, visual quality, robustness performance under noises, and computational complexity.     

Bidirectional controlled teleportation by using nine-qubit entangled state in noisy environments

A theoretical scheme is proposed to implement bidirectional quantum controlled teleportation (BQCT) by using a nine-qubit entangled state as a quantum channel, where Alice may transmit an arbitrary two-qubit state called qubits \(A_1\) and \(A_2\) to Bob; and at the same time, Bob may also transmit an arbitrary two-qubit state called qubits \(B_1\) and \(B_2\) to Alice via the control of the supervisor Charlie. Based on our channel, we explicitly show how the bidirectional quantum controlled teleportation protocol works. And we show this bidirectional quantum controlled teleportation scheme may be determinate and secure. Taking the amplitude-damping noise and the phase-damping noise as typical noisy channels, we analytically derive the fidelities of the BQCT process and show that the fidelities in these two cases only depend on the amplitude parameter of the initial state and the decoherence noisy rate.     

Preparing large-scale maximally entangled <Emphasis Type="Italic">W</Emphasis> states in optical system

We propose an optical scheme to prepare large-scale maximally entangled W states by fusing arbitrary-size polarization entangled W states via polarization-dependent beam splitter. Because most of the currently existing fusion schemes are suffering from the qubit loss problem, that is the number of the output entangled qubits is smaller than the sum of numbers of the input entangled qubits, which will inevitably decrease the fusion efficiency and increase the number of fusion steps as well as the requirement of quantum memories, in our scheme, we design a effect fusion mechanism to generate \(W_{m+n}\) state from a n-qubit W state and a m-qubit W state without any qubit loss. As the nature of this fusion mechanism clearly increases the final size of the obtained W state, it is more efficient and feasible. In addition, our scheme can also generate \(W_{m+n+t-1}\) state by fusing a \(W_m\), a \(W_n\) and a \(W_t\) states. This is a great progress compared with the current scheme which has to lose at least two particles in the fusion of three W states. Moreover, it also can be generalized to the case of fusing k different W states, and all the fusion schemes proposed here can start from Bell state as well.     

一种基于密钥的受控最低有效位修改技术的稳健型量子水印算法

如何更好地保护量子图像的版权，是量子水印技术的一个重要研究课题。基于对数极坐标的量子图像表示，提出了一种新颖的量子水印算法。根据通信双方共享一组密钥的值，发送方选择量子载体图像像素灰度值的高四位中的某一位作为受控位；再根据所选受控位的值，发送方将水印信息嵌入到量子载体图像的最低有效位或次最低有效位上。这种基于密钥的受控最低有效位修改技术，提高了量子水印图像的透明性和稳健性。基于MATLAB的实验仿真和性能分析，也表明新算法在透明性、稳健性和嵌入容量上有着良好的表现。     

Quantum image rotation by an arbitrary angle

In this paper, a novel method of quantum image rotation (QIR) based on shear transformations on NEQR quantum images is proposed. To compute the horizontal and vertical shear mappings required for rotation, we have designed quantum self-adder, quantum control multiplier, and quantum interpolation circuits as the basic computing units in the QIR implementation. Furthermore, we provide several examples of our results by presenting computer simulation experiments of QIR under \(30^\circ \), \(45^\circ \), and \(60^\circ \) rotation scenarios and have a discussion onto the anti-aliasing and computational complexity of the proposed QIR method.     

A highly efficient scheme for joint remote preparation of multi-qubit W state with minimum quantum resource

We present a highly efficient scheme for perfect joint remote preparation of an arbitrary \( 2^{n} \)-qubit W state with minimum quantum resource. Both the senders Alice and Bob intend to jointly prepare one \( 2^{n} \)-qubit W state for the remote receiver Charlie. In the beginning, they help the remote receiver Charlie to construct one n-qubit intermediate state which is closely related to the target \( 2^{n} \)-qubit W state. Afterward, Charlie introduces auxiliary qubits and applies appropriate operations to obtain the target \( 2^{n} \)-qubit W state. Compared with previous schemes, our scheme requires minimum quantum resource and least amount of classical communication. Moreover, our scheme has a significant potential for being adapted to remote state preparation of other special states.     

Maximum density of quantum information in a scalable CMOS implementation of the hybrid qubit architecture

Scalability from single-qubit operations to multi-qubit circuits for quantum information processing requires architecture-specific implementations. Semiconductor hybrid qubit architecture is a suitable candidate to realize large-scale quantum information processing, as it combines a universal set of logic gates with fast and all-electrical manipulation of qubits. We propose an implementation of hybrid qubits, based on Si metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) quantum dots, compatible with the CMOS industrial technological standards. We discuss the realization of multi-qubit circuits capable of fault-tolerant computation and quantum error correction, by evaluating the time and space resources needed for their implementation. As a result, the maximum density of quantum information is extracted from a circuit including eight logical qubits encoded by the [[7, 1, 3]] Steane code. The corresponding surface density of logical qubits is 2.6 Mqubit/cm\(^2\).     

Novel classical post-processing for quantum key distribution-based quantum private query

Existing classical post-processing (CPP) schemes for quantum key distribution (QKD)-based quantum private queries (QPQs) including the \(kN\rightarrow N\), \(N\rightarrow N\), and \(rM\rightarrow N\) ones have been found imperfect in terms of communication efficiency and security. In this paper, we propose a novel CPP scheme for QKD-based QPQs. The proposed CPP scheme reduces the communication complexity and improves the security of QKD-based QPQ protocols largely. Furthermore, the proposed CPP scheme can provide a multi-bit query efficiently.     

Quantum Fourier transform in computational basis

The quantum Fourier transform, with exponential speed-up compared to the classical fast Fourier transform, has played an important role in quantum computation as a vital part of many quantum algorithms (most prominently, Shor’s factoring algorithm). However, situations arise where it is not sufficient to encode the Fourier coefficients within the quantum amplitudes, for example in the implementation of control operations that depend on Fourier coefficients. In this paper, we detail a new quantum scheme to encode Fourier coefficients in the computational basis, with fidelity \(1 - \delta \) and digit accuracy \(\epsilon \) for each Fourier coefficient. Its time complexity depends polynomially on \(\log (N)\), where N is the problem size, and linearly on \(1/\delta \) and \(1/\epsilon \). We also discuss an application of potential practical importance, namely the simulation of circulant Hamiltonians.     

Cost-efficient design of a quantum multiplier–accumulator unit

This paper proposes a cost-efficient quantum multiplier–accumulator unit. The paper also presents a fast multiplication algorithm and designs a novel quantum multiplier device based on the proposed algorithm with the optimum time complexity as multiplier is the major device of a multiplier–accumulator unit. We show that the proposed multiplication technique has time complexity \(O((3 {\hbox {log}}_{2}n)+1)\), whereas the best known existing technique has \(O(n{\hbox {log}}_{2} n)\), where n is the number of qubits. In addition, our design proposes three new quantum circuits: a circuit representing a quantum full-adder, a circuit known as quantum ANDing circuit, which performs the ANDing operation and a circuit presenting quantum accumulator. Moreover, the proposed quantum multiplier–accumulator unit is the first ever quantum multiplier–accumulator circuit in the literature till now, which has reduced garbage outputs and ancillary inputs to a great extent. The comparative study shows that the proposed quantum multiplier performs better than the existing multipliers in terms of depth, quantum gates, delays, area and power with the increasing number of qubits. Moreover, we design the proposed quantum multiplier–accumulator unit, which performs better than the existing ones in terms of hardware and delay complexities, e.g., the proposed (\(n\times n\))—qubit quantum multiplier–accumulator unit requires \(O(n^{2})\) hardware and \(O({\hbox {log}}_{2}n)\) delay complexities, whereas the best known existing quantum multiplier–accumulator unit requires \(O(n^{3})\) hardware and \(O((n-1)^{2} +1+n)\) delay complexities. In addition, the proposed design achieves an improvement of 13.04, 60.08 and 27.2% for \(4\times 4\), 7.87, 51.8 and 27.1% for \(8\times 8\), 4.24, 52.14 and 27% for \(16\times 16\), 2.19, 52.15 and 27.26% for \(32 \times 32\) and 0.78, 52.18 and 27.28% for \(128 \times 128\)-qubit multiplications over the best known existing approach in terms of number of quantum gates, ancillary inputs and garbage outputs, respectively. Moreover, on average, the proposed design gains an improvement of 5.62% in terms of area and power consumptions over the best known existing approach.     

Cyclic quantum teleportation

We propose a scheme of cyclic quantum teleportation for three unknown qubits using six-qubit maximally entangled state as the quantum channel. Suppose there are three observers Alice, Bob and Charlie, each of them has been given a quantum system such as a photon or spin-\(\frac{1}{2}\) particle, prepared in state unknown to them. We show how to implement the cyclic quantum teleportation where Alice can transfer her single-qubit state of qubit a to Bob, Bob can transfer his single-qubit state of qubit b to Charlie and Charlie can also transfer his single-qubit state of qubit c to Alice. We can also implement the cyclic quantum teleportation with \(N\geqslant 3\) observers by constructing a 2N-qubit maximally entangled state as the quantum channel. By changing the quantum channel, we can change the direction of teleportation. Therefore, our scheme can realize teleportation in quantum information networks with N observers in different directions, and the security of our scheme is also investigated at the end of the paper.     

Quantum image with high retrieval performance

Quantum image retrieval is an exhaustive work due to exponential measurements. Casting aside the background of image processing, quantum image is a pure many-body state, and the retrieval task is a physical process named as quantum state tomography. Tomography of a special class of states, permutationally symmetric states, just needs quadratic measurement scales with the number of qubits. In order to take advantage of this result, we propose a method to map the main energy of the image to these states. First, we deduce that \(n+1\) permutationally symmetric states can be constructed as bases of \(2^n\) Hilbert space (n qubits) at least. Second, we execute Schmidt decomposition by continually bipartite splitting of the quantum image (state). At last, we select \(n+1\) maximum coefficients, do base transformation to map these coefficients to new bases (permutationally symmetric states). By these means, the quantum image with high retrieval performance can be gotten.     

A multiple reversible watermarking technique for fingerprint authentication

The classical fingerprint recognition system can be compromised at the database and the sensor. Therefore, to beef up security of the fingerprint recognition system, reversible watermarking is proposed to protect these two points. Reversible watermarks thwart manipulations, \({viz}\)., copy and replay attacks and ensure that native fingerprint recognition accuracy remains unaffected. Fingerprint-dependent watermark \(W_1\) authenticates the database and shields it against the copy attack. The second watermark \(W_2\) verifies fingerprint captured by the sensor and foil replay attack. \(W_2\) is derived from the higher order moments of the fingerprint. Divergence in the computed and extracted watermarks indicates loss of authenticity. The experimental results validate proposed hypothesis.     

Indistinguishability of pure orthogonal product states by LOCC

We construct two sets of incomplete and extendible quantum pure orthogonal product states (POPS) in general bipartite high-dimensional quantum systems, which are all indistinguishable by local operations and classical communication. The first set of POPS is composed of two parts which are \(\mathcal {C}^m\otimes \mathcal {C}^{n_1}\) with \(5\le m\le n_1\) and \(\mathcal {C}^m\otimes \mathcal {C}^{n_2}\) with \(5\le m \le n_2\), where \(n_1\) is odd and \(n_2\) is even. The second one is in \(\mathcal {C}^m\otimes \mathcal {C}^n\) \((m, n\ge 4)\). Some subsets of these two sets can be extended into complete sets that local indistinguishability can be decided by noncommutativity which quantifies the quantumness of a quantum ensemble. Our study shows quantum nonlocality without entanglement.     

Approximate conditional teleportation of a $$\varLambda $$-type three-level atomic state based on cavity QED method beyond Bell-state measurement

Inspiring from the scheme proposed in (Zheng in Phys Rev A 69:064,302 2004), our aim is to teleport an unknown qubit atomic state using the cavity QED method without using the explicit Bell-state measurement, and so the additional atom is not required. Two identical \(\varLambda \)-type three-level atoms are interacted separately and subsequently with a two-mode quantized cavity field where each mode is expressed with a single-photon field state. The interaction between atoms and field is well described via the Jaynes–Cummings model. It is then shown that how if the atomic detection results a particular state of atom 1, an unknown state can be appropriately teleported from atom 1 to atom 2. This teleportation procedure successfully leads to the high fidelity F (success probability \(P_g\)) in between \(69\%\lesssim F\lesssim 100\%\) (\(0.14\lesssim P_g\lesssim 0.56\)). At last, we illustrated that our scheme considerably improves similar previous proposals.     

SLOCC classification of <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis> qubits invoking the proportional relationships for spectrums and standard Jordan normal forms

We investigate the proportional relationships for spectrums and standard Jordan normal forms (SJNFs) of the 4 by 4 matrices constructed from coefficient matrices of two SLOCC (stochastic local operations and classical communication) equivalent states of n qubits. The proportional relationships permit a reduction of SLOCC classification of n (\(\ge 4\)) qubits to a classification of 4 by 4 complex matrices. Invoking the proportional relationships for spectrums and SJNFs, pure states of n (\(\ge 4\)) qubits are partitioned into 12 groups or less and 34 families or less under SLOCC, respectively. Specially, it is true for four qubits.     

Semi-quantum protocol for deterministic secure quantum communication using Bell states

Based on Bell states, this paper proposes a semi-quantum protocol enabling the limited semi-quantum or “classical” user Bob to transmit the secret message to a fully quantum Alice directly. A classical user is restricted to measure, prepare, reorder and send quantum states only in the classical basis \( \{ \left| 0 \right\rangle ,\left| 1 \right\rangle \} \). The protocol must rely on the quantum Alice to produce Bell states, perform Bell basis measurement and store qubits, but the classical party Bob does not require quantum memory. Security and efficiency of the proposed schemes have been discussed. The analysis results show that the protocol is secure against some eavesdropping attacks and the qubit efficiency of the protocol is higher than the other related semi-quantum protocols.     

Comment on “quantum oblivious transfer: a secure practical implementation”

We study the entanglement-based attack on a recently proposed quantum oblivious transfer (OT) protocol (Nagy and Nagy in Quantum Inf Process 15:5037, 2016). While in secure OT, Bob’s probability of obtaining Alice’s secret bit unambiguously should be limited to \(50\%\), we show that if Bob has the technology to handle 5-body entangled states in the current protocol, then he can increase this probability to \(64.6\%\). More importantly, in contrast to what the authors claimed, increasing the number of qubits used in the protocol cannot increase the hardness of Bob’s attack.     

Image classification based on quantum K-Nearest-Neighbor algorithm

Image classification is an important task in the field of machine learning and image processing. However, common classification method, the K-Nearest-Neighbor algorithm, has high complexity, because its two main processes: similarity computing and searching, are time-consuming. Especially in the era of big data, the problem is prominent when the amount of images to be classified is large. In this paper, we try to use the powerful parallel computing ability of quantum computers to optimize the efficiency of image classification. The scheme is based on quantum K-Nearest-Neighbor algorithm. Firstly, the feature vectors of images are extracted on classical computers. Then, the feature vectors are inputted into a quantum superposition state, which is used to achieve parallel computing of similarity. Next, the quantum minimum search algorithm is used to speed up searching process for similarity. Finally, the image is classified by quantum measurement. The complexity of the quantum algorithm is only \(O(\sqrt{kM})\), which is superior to the classical algorithms. Moreover, the measurement step is executed only once to ensure the validity of the scheme. The experimental results show that the classification accuracy is \(83.1\%\) on Graz-01 dataset and \(78\%\) on Caltech-101 dataset, which is close to existing classical algorithms. Hence, our quantum scheme has a good classification performance while greatly improving the efficiency.