We propose a simple scheme to reduce readout errors in experiments on quantum systems with finite number of measurement outcomes. Our method relies on performing classical post-processing which is preceded by Quantum Detector Tomography, i.e., the reconstruction of a Positive-Operator Valued Measure (POVM) describing the given quantum measurement device. If the measurement device is affected only by an invertible classical noise, it is possible to correct the outcome statistics of future experiments performed on the same device. To support the practical applicability of this scheme for near-term quantum devices, we characterize measurements implemented in IBM's and Rigetti's quantum processors. We find that for these devices, based on superconducting transmon qubits, classical noise is indeed the dominant source of readout errors. Moreover, we analyze the influence of the presence of coherent errors and finite statistics on the performance of our errormitigation procedure. Applying our scheme on the IBM's 5-qubit device, we observe a significant improvement of the results of a number of single-and two-qubit tasks including Quantum State Tomography (QST), Quantum Process Tomography (QPT), the implementation of non-projective measurements, and certain quantum algorithms (Grover's search and the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm). Finally, we present results showing improvement for the implementation of certain probability distributions in the case of five qubits.

Standard projective measurements (PMs) represent a subset of all possible measurements in quantum physics, defined by positive-operator-valued measures. We study what quantum measurements are projective simulable, that is, can be simulated by using projective measurements and classical randomness. We first prove that every measurement on a given quantum system can be realized by classical randomization of projective measurements on the system plus an ancilla of the same dimension. Then, given a general measurement in dimension two or three, we show that deciding whether it is PM simulable can be solved by means of semidefinite programming. We also establish conditions for the simulation of measurements using projective ones valid for any dimension. As an application of our formalism, we improve the range of visibilities for which two-qubit Werner states do not violate any Bell inequality for all measurements. From an implementation point of view, our work provides bounds on the amount of white noise a measurement tolerates before losing any advantage over projective ones.