Exploring Image Search on Quantum Computing Systems

Image search beased on descriptor similarities is a fundamental task in computer vision. These descriptors are often highly quantised (e.g. binarised or ternarised). Quantum Computing (QC) has shown to have great potential for a number of tasks including search. Especially Google's new Quantum Processing Unit called Willow reaches new milestones in error correction and durability and presents a benchmark that runs about five minutes in the quantum domain while it would take more than 1025 years on a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer. The supposed reason that this achievement is not immediately claimed for quantum supremacy is that Google also states that the benchmark - the so called Random Circuit Sampling (RCs) benchmark has "not yet known real-world-applications". We therefore transform these benchmark results into the real world by exploring the question: what hardware specifications are needed to execute a quantum implementation of an image descriptor search algorithm more quickly than the fastest supercomputer available today?