

In digital imaging, a pixel (or picture element) is a single point in a raster image. The pixel is the smallest addressable screen element, it is the smallest unit of picture which can be controlled. Each Pixel has its address. The address of a pixel corresponds to its coordinate. Pixels are normally arranged in a 2-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots or squares. Each pixel is a sample of an original image, where 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 digital imaging, a pixel (or picture element) is a single point in a raster image. The pixel is the smallest addressable screen element, it is the smallest unit of picture which can be controlled. Each Pixel has its address. The address of a pixel corresponds to its coordinate. Pixels are normally arranged in a 2-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots or squares. Each pixel is a sample of an original image, where 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), 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.
The word "pixel" was first published in 1965 by Frederic C. Billingsley of JPL (in Pasadena, CA), to describe the picture elements of video images from space probes to the Moon and Mars. However, Billingsley did not coin the term himself. Instead, he got the word "pixel" from Keith E. McFarland, at the Link Division of General Precision in Palo Alto, who did not know where the word originated. McFarland said simply it was "in use at the time" (circa 1963).Lyon, Richard F. (2006). A brief history of 'pixel'. IS&T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging.
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