Chaos based encryption of quantum images

Content, be it any form text, image or video, which needs to be sent from one place to another is vulnerable to third party attacks if it is sent without proper encryption. Therefore, each encryption should be extremely sensitive to change, that is a small change in the key should drastically change the cipher text. In this paper we propose such an image encryption algorithm which is extremely sensitive to such changes. A novel encryption algorithm for quantum images based on chaotic maps is designed. The image is converted into a scrambled state using quantum circuits using the principle of Quantum Hilbert Image Scrambling algorithm. The scrambled image is encrypted using the quantum XOR gate using the chaotic maps algorithm. Numerical and simulation analyses show that the proposed quantum image encryption approach is robust, realizable, and has high efficiency compared to its classical counterpart.