Richard F. Lyon
Chief Scientist, Foveon, Inc.
"History and Future of Electronic Color Photography:
Where Vision and Silicon Meet"
Date: WEDNESDAY, Mar 19, 2003
Time: 6:30pm Refreshments; 7:00pm Speaker
Location: Hewlett Packard (see Directions below)
Pruneridge and Wolfe,
Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room.
Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.
In the late twentieth century, developments in electronic color photography employed color separation techniques recycled from corresponding developments in silver halide photography of the late nineteenth century. Multi-shot cameras, beam-splitter cameras, and screen-plate or filter-mosaic cameras all had their day with film about a century ago, and with electronic sensors more recently. The multi-layer color sensing technique that dominated the twentieth century, originally commercialized as Kodachrome, is now recapitulated in the multi-layer silicon sensor introduced for the twenty-first century as the Foveon X3 technology. These techniques for color photography take their cues from human color vision, but ultimately must "listen to the silicon." A key property of the X3 technology that plays well with human vision is the excellent clean luminance signal corresponding to the sum of the sensor channel signals. Nonlinear image processing takes advantage of this good luminance signal while using the corresponding "soft" color separation to render visually pleasing color photographs.
Richard F. Lyon is presently Chief Scientist of Foveon, Inc., makers of the revolutionary new "X3" full-measured-color image sensor for digital cameras. Before co-founding Foveon in 1997, Dick worked for 20 years in the corporate research labs of Xerox, Schlumberger, and Apple, and spent much of that time also as a visiting associate on the Computer Science faculty at Caltech. His emphasis on digital and analog sensory signal processing dates back to a summer job at Bell Labs where he invented an early bit-serial multiplier for signal processor chips. Dick's interest in photography dates back to grade-school years, and has come around again to merge with his digital signal processing interests, to his delight.