Compressive phase object classification using single-pixel digital holography

A single-pixel camera (SPC) is a computational imaging system that obtains compressed signals of a target scene using a single-pixel detector. The compressed signals can be directly used for image classification, thereby bypassing image reconstruction, which is computationally intensive and requires a high measurement rate. Here, we extend this direct inference to phase object classification using single-pixel digital holography (SPDH). Our method obtains compressed measurements of target complex amplitudes using SPDH and trains a classifier using those measurements for phase object classification. Furthermore, we present a joint optimization of the sampling patterns used in SPDH and a classifier to improve classification accuracy. The proposed method successfully classified phase object images of handwritten digits from the MNIST database, which is challenging for SPCs that can only capture intensity images. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement