1957 First image-processed photo was created at the National Bureau of Standards

In 1957 the first picture was fed into a computer when a rotating drum scanner was connected to SEAC. This project demonstrated that it was possible to perform image processing operations on scanned pictures, using the great processing speed of the computer. Among the many disciplines impacted at NBS by this new field of image processing were metallurgy, character recognition, and criminology.

		In almost all digital date processing machine applications, the input date made available to the machine are the result of some prior processing. This processing is done manually in many applications. Thus, such inputs as punched cards, magnetic tape, and punched paper tape often are the result of a manual processing operation in which a human being is required to inspect visually an array of printed characters and to describe these data in a form capable of being processed by machine. In recognition of the importance of automating such operations, many investigations have been undertaken to devise automatic character sensing equipment. Suppose, however that we attempt to view such effects in proper perspective.
Scanned letter 'P' display on oscilloscope.

We find a more fundamental problem that has, heretofore, failed to receive the attention that it warrants. The problem is one of making directly available to a computer pictorial information which would ordinarily be visually processed by human beings before being fed to a data processing system. This pictorial information may range from such highly stylized forms as printed characters, diagrams, schematic drawings, emblems, and designs through less stylized forms in cartoons and handwritten characters to such highly amorphous forms as photographs of real objects, e.g., people, aerial views, and microscopic and telescopic images.

In recognition of the importance of pictorial sources of data for a data processing system, experiments ware undertaken at the National Bureau of Standards to determine whether automatic processing techniques might be applied to pictorial information in order to reduce the amount of human intervention required during input process. In considering this problem, new areas of the application of automatic data processing techniques for processing pictorial information have appeared. It had not been suspected that automatic data processing techniques were applicable in some of these areas, even if human intervention were allowed. The type of information with which these investigations are concerned ranges from the stylized to the amorphous forms previously mentioned. In the NBS experiments described in this paper, the equipment used consists of the general-purpose digital computer SEAC, to which are attached an input scanner for sensing pictures and copying them into the computer memory, and a cathode-ray-tube output display for reproducing processed pictorial information from the computer memory.

The experiments described here were performed on SEAC during a period when the capability of the computer for performing logical data processing operations was being enhanced by the addition of several new features. The state of SEAC at the time of most of the experiments described here was that of a 1500-word memory computer with an average time of 250 microseconds for performing a three-address instruction. Although faster computers exist, SEAC was found to have one decided advantage over these machines, namely, its availability for experimental use and modification on some frankly exploratory ventures. The restriction of having to account for every minute of use on a more powerful machine would have been a serious deterrent to the production of the experimental results described here.
		Scanned image not from paper.

		The scanner was first connected to SEAC in November, 1956. As far as SEAC is concerned, the scanner is just another input device, and it may be selected by the computer interchangeable with such other input and output devices as a printer, magnetic tapes, tapes, etc. This is shown in Fig. 2. At any time during the operation of a program if the input of photographic information is called for, SEAC start the drum rotating. The analog signal from the scanning photomultiplier id compared with a do reference signal that has been manually determined with a potentiometer setting. If the light reflected from the 0.25mm square being scanned is less than that needed to produce a signal equal to the reference signal, then when a strobe pulse occurs, a binary 1 is fed to SEAC, If a sufficiently white spot is being canned, a binary 0 is fed to SEAC.
Left, Fig. 1 - The scanner. Right, Fig. 2 - The scanner connections to SEAC.

The result of this operation is that in 25 seconds (or less) SEAC can, upon demand, call for all (or any part of) a picture to be fed into its memory. The whole picture is 44 mm by 44 mm and is thus digitalized into 176 by 176 or 30,976 binary digits, each binary digit representing the blackness of a unit square 0.25 mm by 0.25 mm in the picture. The elementary squares cover the whole picture and are no overlapping. He entire picture with one binary digit per square occupies 704 words of SEAC memory. One way of recognizing several different levels of grayness is to use several scans of the picture made with different manual settings of the discriminator threshold. The mechanical precision of the equipment is such that on successive scans of the same picture the scanner reproduces its scan with a maximum discrepancy of less than 0.25 mm at any point in the picture.

Soon as the first picture was fed into SEAC, an uncomfortable fact became apparent. SEAC could store pictorial information in its memory, but the machine users could not "see" the picture in the SEAC memory except by the very time-consuming procedure of printing the contents of the computer memory on a typewriter and attempting to interpret the numerical information. Fortunately, however, there was conveniently available a piece of equipment well suited to the task of producing pictorial output from the SEAC memory. This equipment was capable of decoding two ten-bit fields in a SEAC memory word and producing two analog voltages corresponding to the two sections of the word. There could be up to 96 such words decoded. The rate of presentation of the output signals was 23 kc.

The obvious course was to connect these two analog voltage outputs to the horizontal and vertical inputs on an oscilloscope and thus to plot points on the face of the scope corresponding to the information presented by a computer program for purposes of display. As it turned out, the display equipment was more than adequately fast for SEAC, since no program could generate useful display information that would change at a 23-kc rate. To display a picture that had been fed into the computer from the scanner, it was then necessary to write a program which derived a pair coordinate numbers for each binary C memory in such a way that these coordinates corresponded to those of the point in the picture from which the binary 1 was generated. The program then displayed a spot on the output scope corresponding to the spot on the original picture.

As an example of the use of the output display routine, Fig. 3(b) shows the same picture reproduced from the output display. To produce this picture, an artifice was used which allows the visual effect of a continuous gray scale to be manual discrimination threshold setting. Ordinarily, this setting determines the level at which black is distinguished from white. To scan the picture of Fig. 3 this discrimination threshold was varied with a sawtooth waveform at a frequency approximately one half that of the of the strobing frequency. The result was to produce the familiar "halftone" effect in which the density of uniformly black spots is proportional to the blackness of the original picture. The picture display routine produced the output photograph.

Above article from paper:

R. A. Kirsch, L. Cahn, L. C. Ray, and G. H. Urban, Experiments in processing pictorial information with a digital computer, Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference, Dec. 9-13, 1957, Institute of Radio Engineers, New York (1958).