UC Riverside

Structured light refers to the superposition of different light beams or non-Gaussian spatial beam profiles. Recently, there has been growing interest in understanding the spatial structure of light beams to carry more information, with applications in communications, sensing, and imaging. In this thesis, I propose, analyze, and evaluate a spatial multiplexing approach using fractal-structured light for free space optical (FSO) communication. It is an advantageous approach that reduces receiver size, leverages diffraction, relaxes beam alignment requirements, and increases robustness against atmospheric turbulence. In addition, I build a simple, compact, low-cost, and low-latency full-Stokes camera based on speckle-structured light. This camera is assembled with an metafilm and trained with dense neural network or "small brain" machine learning. The culmination of my research offers new guidelines for combining hybrid computing and polarimetric imaging systems.