Image Representation and Processing Using Ternary Quantum Computing

In this paper we address the recently outlined field of Quantum Image Processing and propose a novel model for representing a quantum image. In our approach we use multilevel quantum systems to store and process images because of their advantages in terms of dimension of the available Hilbert space, computational power, physical implementation and security of quantum cryptographic protocols. In particular, we focus on the quantum image representation using qutrits (3-level quantum systems) and discuss possible implementations for basic image processing tasks such as image complement, image binarization and histogram computation.