With the advancement of underwater communication technology, the traditional modulation dimension has been introduced, developed and utilized. In addition, orbital angular momentum (OAM) is utilized as the modulation dimension for optical underwater communication to obtain larger spectrum resources. The OAM features are extracted using a histogram of oriented gradient and trained using the support vector machine method with a gradient direction histogram feature. The topological charge value of the OAM was used to identify the classification labels, and the ocean turbulence caused by different temperatures and salinity were analyzed. Experimentation results showed that the recognition accuracy for the OAM under the Laguerre–Gaussian beam rates of 1~5, 1~6, 1~7, 1~8, 1~9, and 1~10 was 98.93%, 98.89%, 97.33%, 96.66%, 95.40%, and 95.33%, respectively. The proposed method achieved a high recognition accuracy and performed efficiently under strong turbulence. Our research explored a new technique that provides a new idea for the demodulation of OAM in optical underwater communication.

In underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC), a vortex beam carrying orbital angular momentum has a spatial spiral phase distribution, which provides spatial freedom for UWOC and, as a new information modulation dimension resource, it can greatly improve channel capacity and spectral efficiency. In a case of the disturbance of a vortex beam by ocean turbulence, where a Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) beam carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) is damaged by turbulence and distortion, which affects OAM pattern recognition, and the phase feature of the phase map not only has spiral wavefront but also phase singularity feature, the convolutional neural network (CNN) model can effectively extract the information of the distorted OAM phase map to realize the recognition of dual-mode OAM and single-mode OAM. The phase map of the Laguerre–Gaussian beam passing through ocean turbulence was used as a dataset to simulate and analyze the OAM recognition effect during turbulence caused by different temperature ratios and salinity. The results showed that, during strong turbulence Cn2=1.0×10−13K2m−2/3, when different ω = −1.75, the recognition rate of dual-mode OAM (ℓ = ±1~±5, ±1~±6, ±1~±7, ±1~±8, ±1~±9, ±1~±10) had higher recognition rates of 100%, 100%, 100%, 100%, 98.89%, and 98.67% and single-mode OAM (ℓ = 1~5, 1~6, 1~7, 1~8, 1~9, 1~10) had higher recognition rates of 93.33%, 92.77%, 92.33%, 90%, 87.78%, and 84%, respectively. With the increase in ω, the recognition accuracy of the CNN model will gradually decrease, and in a fixed case, the dual-mode OAM has stronger anti-interference ability than single-mode OAM. These results may provide a reference for optical communication technologies that implement high-capacity OAM.

Underwater wireless communication technology plays an important role in marine environment monitoring and ecological protection. Underwater optical wireless communications (UWOCs) can currently achieve a transmission distance of hundreds of meters, and the rate can reach hundreds of Mbps or even Gbps, with low power consumption and high-speed features. In addition, UWOC also has the advantages of a small transceiver size and strong anti-electromagnetic interference ability, which is especially suitable for scenarios where underwater volume and power consumption are relatively limited. However, UWOC systems face problems such as unstable transceiver ends, ocean turbulence, and so on, resulting in reduced communication reliability and limited transmission distance. Establishing a stable and reliable communication link is critical to extending the communication distance of the UWOC system. In this paper, a model of ocean turbulence channels is established based on the power spectrum inversion method. The transmission characteristics of orbital angular momentum (OAM) light in an ocean turbulence channel are studied, then the mode selection of OAM light is determined. At the same time, the polarization coding technique is applied to the underwater OAM communication system for the first time. The simulation results show that this scheme can effectively extend the communication distance and reduce the system bit error rate.