Taking a selfie is one of the easiest and quickest things you can do on your smartphone. But as with any landmark invention, it took decades and plenty of graft to develop the camera technology that lives in your pocket.

A trio of engineers behind the invention of the image-sensing technology found in billions of smartphones, camera phones, PCs and hospital scanning technology, won the £1 million ($1.3 million) Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering on Wednesday, and spoke about where the image-sensor technology they developed should go in the future.

"I feel gobsmacked and very thankful to the Queen Elizabeth prize for this honor," said one of the engineers, Eric Fossum. "I’m still continuing to do research into very-high sensitivity sensors, so we can work under very dark conditions. I'm working on trying to count every single proton and particle of light as it comes into the sensor."

It took three generations of work in across the world to eventually come up with the technology to produce cameras small and cheap enough to fit in a smartphone.