A new method and apparatus for addressing hexagonally arranged data sampling elements is described. Array set addressing, or ASA, is a new method for capturing information from a hexagonal grid of image sensor pixels, or any hexagonal grid of data sampling elements, for image processing or any computational manipulation of sampling data. ASA represents the hexagonal grids as a set of two rectangular arrays which can individually indexed by integer-valued row and column indices. The two arrays are distinguished using a single binary coordinate so that a full address for any point on the hexagonal grid is uniquely represented by three coordinates representing which array and the row and column. The new addressing method supports efficient linear algebra and other image processing manipulation and can be straightforwardly implemented in conventional electronic hardware and digital processing systems.