Speckle-driven single-shot orbital angular momentum recognition with ultra-low sampling density.

Abstract

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) recognition of vortex beams is critical for applications ranging from optical communications to quantum technologies. However, conventional approaches designed for free-space propagation struggle when light passes through scattering media, such as multimode fibers (MMF), and often rely on high-resolution sensors with tens of thousands of pixels to record detailed intensity profiles. Here, by harnessing scattering media as intrinsic encoders rather than detrimental factors, we introduce a speckle-driven OAM recognition technique termed spatially multiplexed points detection (SMPD). This method extracts intensity information from a few spatially distributed points in a speckle plane, where object feature is naturally multiplexed, thereby transforming scattering from a detrimental effect into an efficient encoding mechanism while drastically reducing sampling requirements. Remarkably, it achieves over 99% retrieval accuracy for OAMs recognition using just 16 sampling points, corresponding to a sampling density of 0.024% compared with conventional imaging-based approaches. Furthermore, spatiotemporally interleaved vortex beams decoding, high-capacity OAM-multiplexed communication, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST classification are implemented to verify the versatility of SMPD. This work establishes a scalable strategy for efficient optical information processing and fiber-based sensing in complex environments.