Lenna
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Lenna.jpg
Lenna is a portion of a centerfold picture of Lena Soderberg, a Swedish model posing naked in the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. The anglicised version of the name was Playboy's naming in the original article — the spelling change was made so that English-speaking readers would read the name closer to the correct pronunciation of the Swedish "Lena".
The image is one of the most widely used standard test images for image compression algorithms — her face and bare shoulder having become a de facto industry standard. However, the use of the image has produced some controversy, with some people concerned about its prurient content, and Playboy at one time threatening to prosecute over the unauthorized use of the image. The magazine has since abandoned the threats, instead embracing the use of "Lenna" for publicity reasons.
David C. Munson, Editor-in-Chief, January 1996 IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, cites two reasons for the popularity of the image in research:
- "First, the image contains a nice mixture of detail, flat regions, shading, and texture that do a good job of testing various image processing algorithms. It is a good test image! Second, the Lena image is a picture of an attractive woman. It is not surprising that the (mostly male) image processing research community gravitated toward an image that they found attractive."
Mrs Soderberg was also a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science in Technology in 1997.
Coincidentally, Playboy states the issue was its best-selling ever, having sold 7,161,561 copies.
History
The picture's history was described in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, in an article by Jamie Hutchinson:
- "Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper. They had tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy.
- "The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512 × 512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders."
See also
External links
- An interesting page about the image (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml)
- Lenna (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lena_std.tif) (TIFF file)
- The full Lena image (http://www.lenna.org/full/l_hires.jpg) (This image contains nudity)
- The comp.compression FAQ (http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/compression-faq/top.html)
- A Note on Lena (http://www.nofiles.de/roots/lena/lenanote.html) by David C. Munson
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