Sahil Tomar

Abhishek Verma, Sahil Tomar, Sandeep Kumar

This work proposes a quantum inspired adaptive quantization framework that enhances the classical JPEG compression by introducing a learned, optimized Qtable derived using a Quantum Walk Inspired Optimization (QWIO) search strategy. The optimizer searches a continuous parameter space of frequency band scaling factors under a unified rate distortion objective that jointly considers reconstruction fidelity and compression efficiency. The proposed framework is evaluated on MNIST, CIFAR10, and ImageNet subsets, using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Bits Per Pixel (BPP), and error heatmap visual analysis as evaluation metrics. Experimental results show average gains ranging from 3 to 6 dB PSNR, along with better structural preservation of edges, contours, and luminance transitions, without modifying decoder compatibility. The structure remains JPEG compliant and can be implemented using accessible scientific packages making it ideal for deployment and practical research use.

Garvit Kumar Mittal, Sahil Tomar, Sandeep Kumar

The rapid advancement of object detection architectures has positioned single stage detectors as the dominant solution for real-time visual perception. A primary source of computational overhead in these models lies in the deep backbone stages, where C2f bottleneck modules at high stride levels accumulate a disproportionate share of parameters due to quadratic scaling with channel width. This work introduces QYOLO, a quantum-inspired channel mixing framework that achieves genuine architectural compression by replacing the two deepest backbone C2f modules at P4/16 (512 channels) and P5/32 (1024 channels) with a compact QMixBlock. The proposed block performs global channel recalibration through a sinusoidal mixing mechanism with shared learnable parameters across both backbone stages, enforcing consistent channel importance without requiring independent per-stage parameter sets. The neck and detection head remain fully classical and unchanged. Evaluation on the VisDrone2019 benchmark demonstrates that QYOLOv8n achieves a 20.2% reduction in parameter count (3.01M to 2.40M) and 12.3% GFLOPs reduction with only 0.4 pp mAP@50 degradation. QYOLOv8s achieves 21.8% reduction with 0.1 pp degradation. When combined with knowledge distillation, full accuracy parity is recovered at no cost to compression. An expanded backbone plus neck variant achieved 38 to 41% reduction at the cost of greater accuracy degradation, motivating the backbone-only final design.

Sahil Tomar, Sandeep Kumar

This paper presents Quantum Gatekeeper, a context-bound image steganography framework where successful payload recovery depends on both cryptographic decryption and the reconstruction of a precise extraction path. The system integrates lossless least significant bit (LSB) embedding with a deterministic variational quantum circuit (VQC)-derived gate key, multi-factor contextual binding, and authenticated encryption. Payload extraction is contingent upon four requisite factors: a password, a shared secret, a user-supplied context string, and a reference image signature. Any deviation in these factors causes the system to read from an incorrect pixel sequence or fail authentication, resulting in silent rejection rather than partial disclosure. The proposed method derives a gatecontrolled extraction key from a seed-conditioned variational circuit, with parameters generated via cryptographic hash expansion and context-dependent image features. To ensure encode/decode consistency, the cryptographic key path is generated via exact statevector simulation; concurrently, IBM superconducting quantum hardware is utilized to evaluate the statistical behavior of the circuit family under physical noise. We introduce a dual-region image layout to resolve the nonce bootstrapping dependency, separating header recovery from payload recovery through independently derived keys. Experimental results confirm successful end-to-end message embedding and recovery on PNG images, demonstrating deterministic success under correct conditions and failure otherwise. The framework supports both text and image payloads; in the image-in-image configuration, a secret image is resized to a fixed resolution prior to embedding, enabling exact pixel-level recovery under correct contextual reconstruction.

Sahil Tomar, Shamshe Alam, Sandeep Kumar et al.

In this paper, a novel quantum classical hybrid framework is proposed that synergizes quantum with Classical Reinforcement Learning. By leveraging the inherent parallelism of quantum computing, the proposed approach generates robust Q tables and specialized turn cost estimations, which are then integrated with a classical Reinforcement Learning pipeline. The Classical Quantum fusion results in rapid convergence of training, reducing the training time significantly and improved adaptability in scenarios featuring static, dynamic, and moving obstacles. Simulator based evaluations demonstrate significant enhancements in path efficiency, trajectory smoothness, and mission success rates, underscoring the potential of framework for real time, autonomous navigation in complex and unpredictable environments. Furthermore, the proposed framework was tested beyond simulations on practical scenarios, including real world map data such as the IIT Delhi campus, reinforcing its potential for real time, autonomous navigation in complex and unpredictable environments.

Sahil Tomar, Sandeep Kumar

This work introduces a compact and hardware efficient method for compressing color images using near term quantum devices. The approach segments the image into fixed size blocks called bixels, and computes the total intensity within each block. A global histogram with B bins is then constructed from these block intensities, and the normalized square roots of the bin counts are encoded as amplitudes into an n qubit quantum state. Amplitude embedding is performed using PennyLane and executed on real IBM Quantum hardware. The resulting state is measured to reconstruct the histogram, enabling approximate recovery of block intensities and full image reassembly. The method maintains a constant qubit requirement based solely on the number of histogram bins, independent of the resolution of the image. By adjusting B, users can control the trade off between fidelity and resource usage. Empirical results demonstrate high quality reconstructions using as few as 5 to 7 qubits, significantly outperforming conventional pixel level encodings in terms of qubit efficiency and validating the practical application of the method for current NISQ era quantum systems.

Sahil Tomar, Rajeshwar Tripathi, Sandeep Kumar

Bone fractures are a leading cause of morbidity and disability worldwide, imposing significant clinical and economic burdens on healthcare systems. Traditional X ray interpretation is time consuming and error prone, while existing machine learning and deep learning solutions often demand extensive feature engineering, large, annotated datasets, and high computational resources. To address these challenges, a distributed hybrid quantum classical pipeline is proposed that first applies Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction and then leverages a 4 qubit quantum amplitude encoding circuit for feature enrichment. By fusing eight PCA derived features with eight quantum enhanced features into a 16 dimensional vector and then classifying with different machine learning models achieving 99% accuracy using a public multi region X ray dataset on par with state of the art transfer learning models while reducing feature extraction time by 82%.