Description Method and Steganography of Quantum Indexed Images

In order to solve the problem of indexed image description on quantum computers, a quantum indexed image description method was proposed. In this method, a quantum indexed image consists of 2 data structures: quantum data matrix and quantum palette matrix. Each data structure represents information based on basic states of qubit sequence. Based on the proposed quantum description method, a quantum indexed image steganography based on EzStego was proposed. In this algorithm, first calculate relative brightness value of each color in the quantum palette matrix;then sort these colors according to their relative brightness values and assign a brightness number to each color;finally, according to the brightness number of each color and its position index, and combined with embedded secret message, the pixel index values in the quantum data matrix are updated. At last, a quantum data matrix with embedded message is obtained. The experiments are implemented in Matlab language with data from USC-SIPI image database on a classical computer. The experimental results verify the feasibility and validness of this scheme from three aspects: visual quality, embedding capacity and robustness. The proposed method could be executed on future quantum computers.