Electronics & Semiconductors

Thin-film short-wave-infrared image sensor with sub-2µm pixel pitch

Imec researchers have developed a prototype high-resolution short-wave-infrared (SWIR) image sensor with record small pixel pitch of 1.82 µm. It is based on a thin-film photodetector that is monolithically integrated on ...

Computer Sciences

Computer scientist, pixel inventor Russell Kirsch dead at 91

Russell Kirsch, a computer scientist credited with inventing the pixel and scanning the world's first digital photograph, died Aug. 11 at his home in Portland, Oregon, The Oregonian reported. He was 91.

Engineering

High-security identification that cannot be counterfeited

Try whispering at one end of the Echo Wall in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. People at the far end of the curved wall will hear you from 65 meters away. This is the whispering-gallery effect. Now, researchers from Japan ...

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Pixel

In digital imaging, a pixel, or pel, (picture element) is a single point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable screen element in a display device; it is the smallest unit of picture that can be represented or controlled.

Each pixel has its own address. The address of a pixel corresponds to its coordinates. Pixels are normally arranged in a two-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots or squares. Each pixel is a sample of an original image; more samples typically provide more accurate representations of the original. The intensity of each pixel is variable. In color image systems, a color is typically represented by three or four component intensities such as red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

In some contexts (such as descriptions of camera sensors), the term pixel is used to refer to a single scalar element of a multi-component representation (more precisely called a photosite in the camera sensor context, although the neologism sensel is sometimes used to describe the elements of a digital camera's sensor), while in others the term may refer to the entire set of such component intensities for a spatial position. In color systems that use chroma subsampling, the multi-component concept of a pixel can become difficult to apply, since the intensity measures for the different color components correspond to different spatial areas in a such a representation.

The word pixel is based on a contraction of pix ("pictures") and el (for "element"); similar formations with el  for "element" include the words voxel and texel.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA