Lenna

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:Jamie Hutchison, "Culture, Communication, and an Information Age Madonna," "IEEE Personal Communication Society Newsletter" Vol. 45, No. 3, May/June 2001, [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/pcs_mirror/may_june01.pdf PDF] ] cquote|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. [Lawrence G. Roberts, "Picture Coding Using Pseudo-Random Noise", MIT, S.M. thesis, 1961. [http://www.packet.cc/files/pic-code-noise.html online] ]

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:David C. Munson, Jr., "A Note on Lena," "IEEE Transactions on Image Processing", Vol. 5, No. 1. Jan. 1996 [http://www.nofiles.de/roots/lena/lenanote.html online] ]

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. [ [http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml Imaging Experts Meet Lenna in Person] ]

Controversy

The use of the image has produced some controversy, with some people concerned about "Playboy" magazine as the source of the image, and with the image being copyrighted.

When the IS&T wanted to invite Lena to their meeting, [Janelle Brown, "Playmate Meets Geeks Who Made Her a Net Star", "Wired News", May 20, 1997 [http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,4000,00.html online] ] cquote|"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. [cite web
url=http://www.playboy.com/worldofplayboy/faq/what.html#4
title = Playboy FAQ
accessmonthday = 15 April
accessyear = 2007
date = 26 May 2006
work = Playboy Online ]

ee also

* Cornell Box - radiosity rendering standard test scene
* Utah teapot - 3D computer graphics test shape
* Stanford Bunny - 3D computer graphics test shape
* Tom's Diner - original test song for MP3
* Standard test image

Notes

References

* — image used numerous times in chapter 6

External links

* http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html
* [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/ The Lenna Story] - Contains a link to an un-cropped scan of the original Playboy photograph