Autoencoder-aided measurement of concentration from a single line of speckle

We demonstrate that a single 6mm line sample of simulated near-field speckle intensity suffices for accurate estimation of the concentration of dielectric micro-particles over a range from 10⁴ to 6⋅10⁶ particles per ml. For this estimation, we analyze the speckle using both standard methods (linear principal component analysis, support vector machine (SVM)) and a neural network, in the form of a sparse stacked autoencoder (SSAE) with a softmax classifier or with an SVM. Using an SSAE with SVM, we classify line speckle samples according to particle concentration with an average accuracy of over 78%, with other methods close behind.