Russell Kirsch, whose research dating back to the 1950s underpins the entire field of digital imaging, died earlier this week at the age of 91. It's hard to overestimate the impact of his work, which led to the first digitized photo and creation. of what we now think of as pixels.
Born to Russian and Hungarian immigrant parents in 1929, Kirsch attended NYU, Harvard and MIT, eventually getting a job at the National Bureau of Standards (later the National Institutes of Science and Technology) which he would keep for the rest of his work life.
Although he has studied, coded and theorized for 50 years and even after his retirement, his most famous achievement is undoubtedly the first digital image scanned, decades before the first digital camera.
The research was undertaken from the point of view that computers - so obviously still things as big as a room - could eventually simulate the human mind and perception. Of course we are still working on it, but an important step was the simulation of the vision, which Kirsch made in 1957.
His research team used "a rotating drum and a photomultiplier to detect reflections from a small image mounted on the drum". In place of grid-based image sampling, an interval punch mask was placed over it to create what was equivalent to pixels, even though that term wouldn't be used for years to come.
By measuring the reflectivity of the part of the image that the machine could see and recording the result in a digital register (managed by SEAC, one of the country's first programmable computers), the system was actually displaying the world - and combining several scans at different are been able to store and display a grayscale image.
Touchingly, that image was of Kirsch's three-month-old son, Walden. It was originally 179 x 179 pixels and it doesn't really look bad more than 60 years later. Here's a better version, a high resolution image of what it would have looked like:
This groundbreaking work led directly to the creation of digital image archiving methods, algorithms and techniques that would inform decades of computing. Kirsch continued his early AI work until retirement, and even then he continued tinkering with his idea of adaptive pixels that would allow for much clearer images at lower resolutions. The idea has value, of course, even if memory and bandwidth aren't quite the bottlenecks they once were.
Throughout his life, Kirsch and his wife, who survived him with their children, were also travelers, climbers and artists. Undoubtedly his rich life contributed to his important work and vice versa.
Kirsch's official obituary and guest book are here.
