Enhancing Optical Imaging via Quantum Computation

Extracting information from weak optical signals is a critical challenge across a broad range of technologies. Conventional imaging techniques, constrained to integrating over detected signals and classical postprocessing, are limited in signal-to-noise ratio from shot noise accumulation in the postprocessing algorithms. We show that these limitations can be circumvented by coherently encoding photonic amplitude information into qubit registers and applying quantum algorithms to process the stored information from asynchronously arriving optical signals. As a specific example, we develop a quantum algorithm for imaging unresolved point sources and apply it to exoplanet detection. We demonstrate that orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance can be achieved under realistic imaging conditions using relatively small-scale quantum processors.