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Revision as of 17:13, 5 July 2007

For the Italian city, see Lenna (BG).
Image of Lena Söderberg famously used in many image processing experiments.

Lenna or Lena is the name given to a standard test image originally cropped from a Playboy magazine centerfold picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model who posed naked for the November 1972 issue. The image is probably the most widely used test image for all sorts of image processing algorithms (such as compression and denoising) and related scientific publications.

The anglicised version "Lenna" of Söderberg's name comes from the Playboy article; Playboy changed the original "Lena".

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 got 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.

Lenna was not the first Playboy magazine image to be used to illustrate image processing algorithms. Lawrence G. Roberts used a 1960 Playboy image, with permission and attribution, in his 1961 MIT master's thesis on image dithering.

Impact

David C. Munson, editor-in-chief, January 1996 IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, cited 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.

Lenna is so widely accepted in the image processing community that Söderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997.

Controversy

The use of the image has produced some controversy, with some people concerned about its prurient content.

When the IS&T wanted to invite Lena to their meeting,

Playboy helped track down the Swedish native in Stockholm, where she helps handicapped people work on (non-networked) computers. Although Playboy is notorious for cracking down on illegal uses of its images, it has decided to overlook the widespread distribution of this particular centerfold. Says Eileen Kent, VP of new media at Playboy: "We decided we should exploit this, because it is a phenomenon."

Coincidentally, Playboy states the issue was its best-selling ever, having sold 7,161,561 copies as of May 2006.

See also

Notes

  1. Jamie Hutchison, "Culture, Communication, and an Information Age Madonna," IEEE Personal Communication Society Newsletter Vol. 45, No. 3, May/June 2001, PDF
  2. Lawrence G. Roberts, Picture Coding Using Pseudo-Random Noise, MIT, S.M. thesis, 1961. online
  3. David C. Munson, Jr., "A Note on Lena," IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 5, No. 1. Jan. 1996 online
  4. Imaging Experts Meet Lenna in Person
  5. Janelle Brown, "Playmate Meets Geeks Who Made Her a Net Star ", Wired News, May 20, 1997 online
  6. "Playboy FAQ". Playboy Online. 26 May 2006. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

References

  • Gonzalez, Rafael C. Digital Image Processing (2nd ed.). ISBN 0-20-118075-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) — image used numerous times in chapter 6

External links

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