Optical edge computing for speckle sensing interrogation

Abstract Speckle-based sensing exploits the rich environmental information of its high-dimensional spatial intensity patterns. However, the requirement for camera-based acquisition and subsequent electronic digitization introduces significant latency and bandwidth bottlenecks that forbid real-time operation and higher temporal resolutions. Aiming to bypass this imaging processing pipeline, this manuscript presents an optically reconfigurable edge-computing platform for speckle-based sensors that performs task-specific computation directly in the optical domain. This is achieved by projecting output speckle patterns onto a digital micromirror device, using it as a programmable optical layer whose parameters are trained in situ using an evolutionary optimization strategy solely from detector feedback. We demonstrate the concept with a multi-point optical fiber sensing task, where multiple piezoelectric actuators simultaneously perturb the fiber, modifying the speckle pattern. By optimizing a set of masks to decouple these concurrent signals, the system successfully achieves real-time signal separation, achieving a target signal enhancement exceeding 4 dB while suppressing crosstalk leakage below −10 dB. Operating with bandwidths limited only by the photodetector, this approach paves the way for real-time and ultrafast optical sensing via an optical edge computing solution.