  This paper proposes a quantum computing-based algorithm to solve the single
image super-resolution (SISR) problem. One of the well-known classical
approaches for SISR relies on the well-established patch-wise sparse modeling
of the problem. Yet, this field's current state of affairs is that deep neural
networks (DNNs) have demonstrated far superior results than traditional
approaches. Nevertheless, quantum computing is expected to become increasingly
prominent for machine learning problems soon. As a result, in this work, we
take the privilege to perform an early exploration of applying a quantum
computing algorithm to this important image enhancement problem, i.e., SISR.
Among the two paradigms of quantum computing, namely universal gate quantum
computing and adiabatic quantum computing (AQC), the latter has been
successfully applied to practical computer vision problems, in which quantum
parallelism has been exploited to solve combinatorial optimization efficiently.
This work demonstrates formulating quantum SISR as a sparse coding optimization
problem, which is solved using quantum annealers accessed via the D-Wave Leap
platform. The proposed AQC-based algorithm is demonstrated to achieve improved
speed-up over a classical analog while maintaining comparable SISR accuracy.
