Russell A. Kirsch, 91, who was an American engineer, inventor of the pixel and developer of the image scanner, died on Tuesday, August 11, 2020 of complications from Alzheimer's disease.


Russell Kirsch, Inventor of the Pixel, Passed Away This Week

Quote:Computer scientist Russell A. Kirsch, the inventor of the pixel and an undisputed pioneer of digital imaging, passed away on Tuesday in his Portland home from complications arising from a form of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 91 years old.

Russell Kirsch may not be a name that you immediately recognize, but his contributions to computer science made digital imaging possible.

The room-sized Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) was used to create the first scanned image. From the NIST and in the public domain.

from Wiki:

Quote:In 1951 Kirsch joined the National Bureau of Standards as part of the team which ran SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer). SEAC was the U.S.'s first stored-program computer to become operational, having entered service in 1950.

In 1957, Kirsch's group developed a digital image scanner, to “trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs”, and made the first digital scans. One of the first photographs scanned, a picture of Kirsch’s three-month-old son, was captured as just 30,976 pixels, a 176 × 176 array, in an area measuring 5 cm × 5 cm. The bit depth was only one bit per pixel, stark black and white with no intermediate shades of gray, but by combining several scans made using different scanning thresholds, grayscale information could also be acquired. They used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize alphanumeric characters and produce oscilloscope displays. Kirsch also proposed the Kirsch operator for edge detection.

Later in life, Kirsch became the director of research of the Sturvil Corporation and an advisory editor for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is currently the advisory editor of the journal, Languages of Design.

Because of its importance in the development of digital photography, in 2003 Kirsch's scanned picture of his son was named by Life magazine one of the “100 Photographs That Changed the World”.