The K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm is one of the most extensively used classification algorithms, while its high time complexity limits its performance in the era of big data. The quantum K-nearest neighbor (QKNN) algorithm can handle the above problem with satisfactory efficiency; however, its accuracy is sacrificed when directly applying the traditional similarity measure based on Euclidean distance. Inspired by the Polar coordinate system and the quantum property, this work proposes a new similarity measure to replace the Euclidean distance, which is defined as Polar distance. Polar distance considers both angular and module length information, introducing a weight parameter adjusted to the specific application data. To validate the efficiency of Polar distance, we conducted various experiments using several typical datasets. For the conventional KNN algorithm, the accuracy performance is comparable when using Polar distance for similarity measurement, while for the QKNN algorithm, it significantly outperforms the Euclidean distance in terms of classification accuracy. Furthermore, the Polar distance shows scalability and robustness superior to the Euclidean distance, providing an opportunity for the large-scale application of QKNN in practice.

Quantum computing as a new computing model with parallel computing capability and high information carrying capacity, has attracted a lot of attention from researchers. Ensemble learning is an effective strategy often used in machine learning to improve the performance of weak classifiers. Currently, the classification performance of quantum classifiers is not satisfactory enough due to factors such as the depth of quantum circuit, quantum noise, and quantum coding method, etc. For this reason, this paper combined the ensemble learning idea and quantum classifiers to design a novel hybrid quantum machine learning model. Firstly, we run the Stacking method in classical machine learning to realize the dimensionality reduction of high-latitude data while ensuring the validity of data features. Secondly, we used the Bagging method and Bayesian hyperparameter optimization method applied to quantum support vector machine (QSVM), quantum K nearest neighbors (QKNN), variational quantum classifier (VQC). Thirdly, the voting method is used to ensemble the predict results of QSVM, QKNN, VQC as the final result. We applied the hybrid quantum ensemble machine learning model to malicious code detection. The experimental results show that the classification precision (accuracy, F1-score) of this model has been improved to 98.9% (94.5%, 94.24%). Combined with the acceleration of quantum computing and the higher precision rate, it can effectively deal with the growing trend of malicious codes, which is of great significance to cyberspace security.

Image matching is an important research topic in computer vision and image processing. However, existing quantum algorithms mainly focus on accurate matching between template pixels, and are not robust to changes in image location and scale. In addition, the similarity calculation of the matching process is a fundamentally important issue. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid quantum algorithm, which uses the robustness of SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform) to extract image features, and combines the advantages of quantum exponential storage and parallel computing to represent data and calculate feature similarity. Finally, the quantum amplitude estimation is used to extract the measurement results and realize the quadratic acceleration of calculation. The experimental results show that the matching effect of this algorithm is better than the existing classical architecture. Our hybrid algorithm broadens the application scope and field of quantum computing in image processing.