Peter L. P. Dillon

Peter L. P. Dillon (March 22, 1934 – April 30, 2026) was an American physicist, and the inventor of integral color image sensors and single-chip color video cameras. Dillon joined Kodak Research Labs in 1959 and retired from Kodak in 1991. He joined Kodak Research Labs (KRL) in 1959. while Peter Dillon was responsible for the camera portion. But CCD sensors only captured black and white (i.e., monochrome) images. At the time, a color CCD camera required three sensors and a color beam splitter (e.g., a prism), making it too bulky and expensive for a handheld camcorder.

In 1974, Dillon conceived the idea of fabricating a pattern of color filters directly on top of the individual pixels of a CCD image sensor, during the latter steps of the wafer fabrication process. After working with his KRL colleagues to fabricate the CFA and develop the circuitry needed for a single-chip color camera, Dillon presented his work at an IEEE conference in December 1976. However, the Bayer CFA was incompatible with the interlaced readout used in NTSC television scanning, since red and blue appear only on alternate lines and therefore only in alternate fields. Dillon then invented an alternative CFA pattern, with a green checkerboard, and both red and blue colored pixels on each line. He used this pattern for the color CCD sensor (shown in the below figure) in the single chip camera he developed. As a result, the color filters could be simultaneously applied to the hundreds of image sensor chips being fabricated on the same wafer before the chips were diced and packaged. This made the process very economical.

Since Kodak had not yet developed working CCD image sensors, KRL fabricated the first CFA (using Dillon's CFA pattern) on a small glass plate.

Single-chip color camera processing

Dillon incorporated this 100 x 100 pixel color image sensor in the world's first single-chip color video camera, which he described in an IEEE paper published in February 1978. This patent describes the signal processing circuitry used to create full red, green, and blue camera output signals from the CFA pixel values. The circuitry samples the sensor's output signal at the appropriate times, in order to decode the color pattern, and then interpolates intermediate values between the samples. It processes the green pixels to produce a high spatial frequency luminance signal, which is added to the three low spatial frequency color channels,

Dillon is responsible for another important video camera technology, which extends the range of operation at low light levels. As described in U.S. Patent No. 4,016,597, Dillon and his KRL colleague Jim DePalma recognized that integral color image sensors are sensitive to infrared (IR) wavelengths. As a result, color video cameras must include an Infrared (IR) blocking filter in order to obtain proper color reproduction. They demonstrated that, by automatically removing the IR blocking filter at very low light levels, the sensitivity could be significantly increased to produce acceptable monochrome images.

Personal life and death Dillon lived in Pittsford, New York. He died on April 30, 2026, at the age of 92.

Honors and awards

Dillon and Albert Brault both received Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards in 2019 for “Pioneering Development of the Single-Chip Color Camera”. In 2022, they received the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for “Contributions to the development of image sensors with integrated color filter arrays for digital video and still cameras".