In view of the influence of the scattering medium in the reconstruction of single-pixel imaging, the reconstructed image cannot achieve the best effect. The applicability of the correlation algorithm and compressed sensing algorithm for image reconstruction with or without the scattering medium was investigated. The influence of the spatial structure change of modulated information in the imaging path and the signal loss in detection path caused by the medium was analyzed, a near-infrared single-pixel imaging system was established, and the single-pixel imaging of penetrating the biological tissues scattering medium with the CGI algorithm and the TVAL3 algorithm was realized. It was found that the reconstruction time, peak signal-to-noise ratio and SSIM of the TVAL3 were better than CGI when there was no medium; while two of the three values of the CGI were better when there was medium, its maximum reconstruction time (0.304091 s) was smaller than the minimum (1.766299 s) of the TVAL3, and its minimum PSNR (9.9831dB) was higher than the maximum (9.170456 dB) of the TVAL3, and its SSIM (0.0982,0.1178) lay within the range of the SSIM of the TVAL3 (0.099258-0.497622). The results show that the CGI based on correlation imaging theory is more suitable for imaging scattering media, and the TVAL3 based on compressed perception theory is more suitable for imaging non-scattering media.