Bryce Edward Bayer (/ˈbaɪər/; pronounced BYE-er, August 15, 1929 – November 13, 2012) was an American scientist who invented the Bayer filter pattern, which is used in most modern color digital cameras. He has been called "the maestro without whom photography as we know wouldn't have been the same."
Early life and education
Bryce Edward Bayer was born in Portland, Maine, on August 15, 1929, to Alton and Marguerite Willard Bayer. As a boy he tinkered with Brownies and other cameras. He graduated in 1947 from Deering High School in Portland, where he spent a good deal of time in the school darkroom. "He, in fact, processed all of the pictures for his high school yearbook," his son David told The New York Times following Bayer's death.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from the University of Maine in 1951, Bayer moved to Rochester, New York, to work as a research scientist at Eastman Kodak, where he would remain until his retirement in 1986. At Kodak he met Joan Fitzgerald, a fellow researcher; they were married in 1954. Bayer pursued further studies at the University of Rochester, from which he earned a master's degree in industrial statistics in 1960.
Bayer filter
In 1974, while working for Kodak, Bayer was asked to consider what color filter pattern to use for an integral color image sensor being developed by Kodak Research Labs. He documented his design in his laboratory notebook on May 24,1974. In March 1975, Kodak filed a patent application, titled "Color imaging array", with Bayer as the sole inventor. The patent, which issued as U.S. patent 3,971,065 in July 1976, describes color patterns having luminance (e.g. green) elements arranged in a checkerboard pattern to provide uniform luminance sampling in both the horizontal and vertical directions. In the Bayer color filter array pattern, used today in almost all single-chip color cameras, half of the pixels collect green light, and the others are evenly divided between red and blue light. The resulting Nyquist domains for the green sampling maintains the same Nyquist frequency for horizontal and vertical spatial frequencies as a sensor having all green-sensitive elements.
"The pattern is very simple," Ken Parulski, former chief scientist for Kodak's digital camera division, told The New York Times after Bayer's death. "There are twice as many green elements as red or blue because this mimics the way the human eye provides the sharpest overall color image." Parulski added that although dozens of other patterns have since been devised, including some by Parulski himself, "the Bayer pattern has stood the test of time." Larry Scarff, a former chairman of the Camera Phone Image Quality Standards Group, told the Times that "Ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of all digital cameras — cellphones, pocket cameras, webcams and consumer digital video cameras — use the Bayer pattern to produce color pictures." Dr. Terry Taber, Kodak Vice President and Chief Technology Officer has said that the "elegant colour technology invented by Bryce Bayer is behind nearly every digital image captured today."
According to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Bayer's work on the filter "helped pave the way for the development of the first working digital camera a year later." Steve Sasson, co-inventor of the first digital camera, told the Rochester newspaper "that Bayer's contributions were not only pioneering but prophetic." Sasson added that "Bryce has always been a hero for me." Parulski told the Democrat and Chronicle that he felt "very lucky to have worked with Bryce, starting on my very first day at Kodak....Bryce was so modest and unassuming, it took me years to realize what a genius he really was." Parulski added "that Bayer's invention is the key reason we have cameras that are compact yet provide sharp-looking pictures."
Other professional activities
Bayer's contribution to photography also included algorithms that play a crucial role in storing, enhancing, and printing digital images. As a leader within the Information Technology Laboratory within the Physics Division of the Kodak Research Laboratories (KRL), Bryce demonstrated, in the early eighties, that computers could greatly enhance image quality. For example, he showed a large print of a dock scene made from a very small Disc camera negative. The image looked like it had been made from a much larger 35 mm negative. One could see the braids in the rope sitting on the dock.