Frederic Crockett Billingsley (23 July 1921 – 31 May 2002) was an American engineer, who spent most of his career developing techniques for

digital image processing Digital image processing is the use of a digital computer to process digital images through an algorithm. As a subcategory or field of digital signal processing, digital image processing has many advantages over analog image processing. It allo ...

in support of American space probes to the moon, to Mars, and to other planets. Billingsley published two papers in 1965 using the word ''

pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the ...

'', and may have been the first to publish that neologism for ''picture element''. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and died in Great Falls, Montana.

Image processing contributions

Billingsley was one of the pioneers of

mentioned in "THE BEST OF NASA'S SPINOFFS," which says:

There also was a need for hardware to record both analog video and digital images on film. No suitable commercial hardware existed, so JPL's Fred Billingsley designed a system called the Video Film Converter (VFC). Built for JPL by Link General Precision, the VFC was used in the 1970s for image playback of the striking pictures returned by the planetary missions of the unmanned Mariner spacecraft.

The JPL document "Overview of VICAR" shows that Billingsley did software as well as hardware:

The VICAR image processing language was defined by JPL employees Stan Bressler, Howard Frieden and Fred Billingsley, and implemented in 1966 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to process image data produced by the planetary exploration program.

References

External links

Pixel History talk
dedicated to Fred Billingsley 1921 births 2002 deaths American electrical engineers 20th-century American engineers {{US-electrical-engineer-stub