Information AboutLenna |
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Lenna is the name given to a portion of a Centerfold picture of ''' Lena Söderberg ''', a Swedish model posing Naked in the November 1972 issue of '' Playboy '' Magazine . The anglicised version of the name comes from the article; Playboy changed it so English-speaking readers would pronounce the name correctly. The image is one of the most widely used Standard Test Image s for Image Compression Algorithm s — her face and bare shoulder having become a '' De Facto '' Industry Standard . It is so widely accepted that Söderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society For Imaging Science In Technology in 1997 . 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.'' 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. 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 Image s, 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 Engineer s 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 Converter s (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
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