Career
Billingsley published two papers in 1965 using the word pixel, and may have been the first to publish that neologism for picture element. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and died in Great Falls, Montana. Billingsley was one of the pioneers of digital image processing mentioned in "THE BEST OF National Aeronautics and Space Administration"South SPINOFFS," which says:
There also was a need for hardware to record both analog video and digital images on film.
Number suitable commercial hardware existed, so Jet Propulsion Laboratory"s Fred Billingsley designed a system called the Video Film Converter (VFC).
Built for Jet Propulsion Laboratory by Link General Precision, the VFC was used in the 1970s for image playback of the striking pictures returned by the planetary missions of the unmanned Mariner spacecraft. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory document "Overview of VICAR" shows that Billingsley did software as well as hardware:
The VICAR image processing language was defined by Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees Stan Bressler, Howard Frieden and Fred Billingsley, and implemented in 1966 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to process image data produced by the planetary exploration program
