3–6 Feb 2026
Europe/Rome timezone

Quantum image processing and optical neural networks

6 Feb 2026, 09:40
20m
Auditorium U12 - Guido Martinotti

Auditorium U12 - Guido Martinotti

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Edificio U12, Via Vizzola, 5, 20126 Milano (MI)

Speaker

Dr Simone Roncallo (University of Pavia)

Description

Visual information can be manipulated in terms of images, usually captured and then processed through a sequence of computational operations. Alternatively, optical systems can perform such operations directly, reducing computational overhead at the cost of stricter design requirements. We discuss this workflow in the context of quantum technologies. First, we introduce a quantum computational algorithm that uses the quantum Fourier transform to discard the high spatial-frequency qubits of an image, downsampling it to a lower resolution. Our method allows us to capture, compress, and communicate visual information (or high-dimensional natural data) even with limited resources [1,2]. Then, we present a quantum optical pattern recognition method for binary classification tasks. Leveraging the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect, this setup is specifically designed to reproduce classical perceptrons and shallow neural networks. Our method classifies patterns without reconstructing their images, encoding the spatial information of the object in the spectrum of a single photon, providing a superexponential speedup over classical methods [3,4].

References
[1] Simone Roncallo, Lorenzo Maccone and Chiara Macchiavello, Quantum JPEG, AVS Quantum Sci. 5, 043803 (2023)
[2] Emanuele Tumbiolo, Simone Roncallo, Chiara Macchiavello and Lorenzo Maccone, Quantum frequency resampling, npj Quantum Inf. 11, 123 (2025)
[3] Simone Roncallo, Angela Rosy Morgillo, Chiara Macchiavello, Lorenzo Maccone and Seth Lloyd, Quantum optical classifier with superexponential speedup, Commun. Phys. 8 147 (2025)
[4] Simone Roncallo, Angela Rosy Morgillo, Seth Lloyd, Chiara Macchiavello and Lorenzo Maccone, Quantum optical shallow networks, arXiv.2507.21036

Sessions Quantum Machine Learning:
Invited No

Authors

Dr Simone Roncallo (University of Pavia) Dr Angela Rosy Morgillo (University of Pavia) Dr Emanuele Tumbiolo (University of Pavia)

Co-authors

Prof. Lorenzo Maccone (University of Pavia) Prof. Chiara Macchiavello (University of Pavia) Prof. Seth Lloyd (MIT)

Presentation materials