A brief history of 'pixel'

Richard F. Lyon

doi:10.1117/12.644941

10 February 2006 A brief history of 'pixel'

Richard F. Lyon

Proceedings Volume 6069, Digital Photography II; 606901 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.644941
Event: Electronic Imaging 2006, 2006, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

The term pixel, for picture element, was first published in two different SPIE Proceedings in 1965, in articles by Fred C. Billingsley of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The alternative pel was published by William F. Schreiber of MIT in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1967. Both pixel and pel were propagated within the image processing and video coding field for more than a decade before they appeared in textbooks in the late 1970s. Subsequently, pixel has become ubiquitous in the fields of computer graphics, displays, printers, scanners, cameras, and related technologies, with a variety of sometimes conflicting meanings.

Citation Download Citation

Richard F. Lyon "A brief history of 'pixel'", Proc. SPIE 6069, Digital Photography II, 606901 (10 February 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.644941

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