Quantum medical image encoding and compression using Fourier-based methods

Quantum image processing (QIMP) has recently emerged as a promising field for modern image processing applications. In QIMP algorithms, encoding classical image informaiton into quantum circuit is important as the first step. However, most of existing encoding methods use gates almost twice the number of pixels in an image, and simulating even a modest sized image is computationally demanding. In this work, we propose a quantum image encoding method that effectively reduces gates than the number of pixels by a factor at least 4. We demonstrate our method for various 1024 by 1024 high-quality medical images captured during the Bilateral Axillo-Breast Approach (BABA) robotic thyroidectomy surgery. Additionally, two compression techniques are proposed to further reduce the number of gates as well as pre-processing time with negligible loss of image quality. We suggest our image encoding strategy as a valuable option for large scale medical imaging.