Our optical scattering–based bacterial identification system replaces complex lasers with affordable RGB LEDs, capturing three color diffraction images that are registered and fused for enhanced sharpness. Using a YOLOv8 detector, the method rapidly and accurately distinguishes bacterial strains—including MRSA—with 97% accuracy (mAP50 = 0.97). This approach is fast, label-free, low-cost, and easily integrated into existing workflows.