Structured light meets machine intelligence

Abstract Structured light, where light is tailored in all its degrees of freedom, has shown tremendous power in unlocking new modalities of light, with its impact felt across dimensions, disciplines, and applications. This richly textured light comes with deeply embedded complexity, making the design, analysis, and recognition of such complex light patterns highly non-trivial. In recent years artificial intelligence (AI) has come to the fore, offering innovative approaches and tools beyond the purely optical domain, not only for the design, characterization, and optimization of structured light but also for increasingly important roles in adding new functionalities and breaking old paradigms. An exciting twist is the flip side of the coin, where complex light in complex media acts as a light-speed neural network, ushering in a new era of ultrafast optical-based “machines” for intelligence and learning. In this review, we highlight how AI has enhanced structured light technologies, and vice versa, touching on imaging, microscopy, sensing, communication, and optical neural networks as topical application areas, while covering scales from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and from classical to quantum. We highlight the symbiotic relationship between intelligence and light in these processes and offer a perspective on the open challenges and future prospects of this emerging research direction.