Speckle-Driven Single-Shot Orbital Angular Momentum Recognition with Ultra-Low Sampling Density

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 vortex beams propagate within or through complex media, such as multimode fibers (MMF), and often rely on high-resolution imaging sensors with tens of thousands of pixels to record dense intensity profiles. Here, we introduce a speckle-driven OAM recognition technique that exploits the intrinsic correlation between speckle patterns and OAM states, circumventing the limitations of scattering media while drastically reducing sampling requirements. Our method, termed spatially multiplexed points detection (SMPD), extracts intensity information from spatially distributed points in a multiplexed speckle plane. Remarkably, it achieves > 99% retrieval accuracy for OAMs recognition using just 16 sampling points, corresponding to a sampling density of 0.024%—4096 times lower than conventional imaging-based approaches. Furthermore, high-capacity OAM-multiplexed communication decoding with an error rate of < 0.2% and handwritten digit recognition with an accuracy of 89% are implemented to verify the versatility of SMPD. This work transcends the trade-off between sampling density and accuracy, establishing a scalable platform for resource-efficient photonic applications like quantum communication and endoscopic sensing.