Bryce Bayer - Telegraph A digital camera uses a silicon chip sensor consisting of an array of millions of tiny light cavities, or "pixels," to record an image. When a photograph is taken, each of these is uncovered to collect and store photons. The relative quantity of photons in each cavity is then sorted into various intensity levels. The trouble for scientists working on developing digital technology was that these light cavities are naturally colour-blind. Each of their millions of tiny photosensitive elements measures only the intensity of incoming light, not its wavelength - or colour. Bayer had the elegant idea of arranging a series of microscopic red, blue and green colour filters into a chequerboard pattern over the sensor. Mimicking the way the human eye perceives colour, he included twice as many green as red and blue filters (the human eye has a higher sensitivity to green light). Due to the filter each pixel measures only one colour. The extent to which the camera then needs to adjust the raw data coming from a particular pixel to include the two other colours is then estimated using the eight surrounding pixels - a technique called Bayer "demosaicing," or Bayer to RGB (red, green and blue) Conversion. Bayer's work helped pave the way for the development in 1977 (by two other Kodak researchers) of the first working digital camera. The camera was a black-and-white device that later incorporated the Bayer filter. The alternative to the Bayer single-sensor filter would have required three separate sensors attached to a colour beam splitter - a solution that would have been cumbersome and expensive. The advantages of the Bayer filter included its relatively low cost and the fact that it enabled the development of smaller, sleeker digital devices. Bryce Edward Bayer was born in Portland, Maine, on August 15 1929 and was fascinated by photography from an early age; at Deering High School, Portland, he spent much of his time in the school darkroom and processed all the photographs for his school yearbook. After taking a degree in Engineering Physics at the University of Maine, in 1951 he began his career as a research scientist with Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York State, and remained with the firm until his retirement in the mid-1990s. He took a Master's degree in Industrial Statistics from the University of Rochester in 1960 and, as well as the Bayer Filter, developed processes for storing, improving and printing digital images. In 2009 the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain presented Bayer with its Progress Award. Earlier this year he was awarded the first Camera Origination and Imaging Medal from the American Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. He married, in 1954, Joan Fitzgerald, a fellow researcher at Kodak, who survives him with their daughter and two sons. Bryce Bayer, born August 15 1929, died November 13 2012