Image segmentation on a quantum computer

In this paper, we address the field of quantum information processing and analyze the prospects of applying quantum computation concepts to image processing tasks. Specifically, we discuss the development of a quantum version for the image segmentation operation. This is an important technique that comes up in many image processing applications. We consider the threshold-based segmentation and show that a quantum circuit to achieve this operation can be built using a quantum oracle that implements the thresholding function. We discuss the circuit implementation of the oracle operator and provide examples of segmenting synthetic and real images. The main advantage of the quantum version for image segmentation over the classical approach is its speedup and is provided by the special properties of quantum information processing: superposition of states and inherent parallelism.