Rethinking Video Transmission: A Quantum Fourier Transform-Based Approach for Error-Prone Channels

Reliable video transmission over error-prone channels remains a significant challenge due to the inherent trade-off between compression efficiency and noise resilience in conventional systems. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel quantum Fourier transform (QFT)-based framework that integrates video compression and transmission within a unified quantum frequency-domain representation. The framework converts video data into a classical bitstream and maps it onto multi-qubit quantum states with variable encoding sizes (n), enabling flexible control over compression levels. Through the application of the QFT, these states are transformed into the frequency domain, where only selected coefficients are transmitted to reduce bandwidth requirements. At the receiver, the transmitted components are used to reconstruct the full representation, followed by inverse transformation and decoding to recover the video sequence. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated using peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and video multi-method assessment fusion (VMAF). The results demonstrate that increasing the number of qubits enables exponential compression, achieving ratios up to 2n:1, while maintaining high reconstruction quality under ideal transmission conditions. However, higher-qubit configurations exhibit increased sensitivity to channel noise, leading to a more rapid degradation as the signal-to-noise ratio decreases. In contrast, lower-qubit configurations provide improved robustness, maintaining more stable reconstruction quality under noisy conditions, albeit with reduced compression efficiency. Among the evaluated configurations, the two-qubit system achieves an effective trade-off, providing a compression ratio of 4:1 while maintaining strong visual and structural fidelity along with enhanced resilience to channel impairments.