Quantum autoencoder for image compression through reducing qubits usage

Quantum autoencoder, as a quantum machine learning algorithm, provides an important research direction for image compression. This paper proposes a quantum autoencoder specifically designed for image compression. We first use feature mapping to store images as quantum states and propose a new parameterized quantum circuit and a pre-training method. After pre-training, a reference state is determined and the circuit parameters are updated through further training. Finally, we experimentally validate the quantum autoencoder. For reconstructed 10-qubit images, the fidelity reaches 0.98 and the SSIM reaches 0.927. For reconstructed 10-qubit noisy images, the PSNR improves by 1.4[Formula: see text]dB. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed quantum autoencoder efficiently compresses quantum images while also possessing denoising capabilities.