Russell A. Kirsch

Russell A. Kirsch
Russell Kirsch in Portland, Oregon with Joel Runyon
Born	1929 (age 87–88)
Residence	Portland, Oregon, United States
Education	Bronx High School of Science (1946), BEE New York University (1950), SM Harvard University (1952), American University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Occupation	Computer scientist
Known for	First digital image scanner
Spouse(s)	Joan (née Levin) Kirsch
Children	Walden Kirsch (KGW reporter), 3 other children

Russell A. Kirsch (born 1929) is an American former engineer at the National Bureau of Standards who developed the first digital image scanner.

Kirsch attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1946. He continued his education at New York University in 1950, Harvard University in 1952, and later the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kirsch is married to Joan (née Levin) Kirsch. Kirsch has spent most of his professional life in Washington, D.C. where he was affiliated with the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) for nearly 50 years. Now retired, he resides in Portland, Oregon.

In 1951 Kirsch joined the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) as part of the team which ran SEAC, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer. SEAC was the U.S.'s first stored-program computer to become operational, having entered service in 1950.

In 1957, Kirsch's group developed a digital image scanner, to “trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs”, and made the first digital scans. One of the first photographs scanned, a picture of Kirsch’s three-month-old son, was captured as just 30,976 pixels, a 176 × 176 array, in an area measuring 5 cm × 5 cm. The bit depth was only one bit per pixel, stark black and white with no intermediate shades of gray, but by combining several scans made using different scanning thresholds, grayscale information could also be acquired. They used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize alphanumeric characters and produce oscilloscope displays. Kirsch also proposed the Kirsch operator for edge detection.