Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Yet today, as a year-old retiree living in her native Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. In , at the age of 21, she appeared as Miss November, wearing nothing but a feathered sun hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa.
They tore off the top third of the spread, ran it through a set of analog-to-digital converters, and saved the resulting line scan to their Hewlett-Packard Sawchuk did not respond to requests for comment. The USC team proudly handed out copies to lab visitors, and soon the image of the young model looking coquettishly over her bare shoulder became an industry standard, replicated and reanalyzed billions of times as what we now know as the JPEG came into being.
For almost as long as the Lenna has been idolized among computer scientists, however, it has also been a source of controversy. Munson Jr. Yet, 19 years later, the Lenna remained so ubiquitous that Maddie Zug, a high school senior from Virginia, felt compelled to write an op-ed about it in The Washington Post. Deanna Needell, a math professor at UCLA, had similar memories from college , so in she and a colleague staged a quiet protest: They acquired the rights to a head shot of the male model Fabio Lanzoni and used that for their imaging research instead.
But perhaps the most stringent critic of the image is Emily Chang, author of Brotopia. One voice that has been conspicuously missing from the Lenna debate is that of Lena herself. The first and last time she spoke with the American press was in , at the same conference where she was given her beloved mantel clock. I started looking for Lena about a year ago. Lena Soderberg ne Sjooblom was last reported living in her native Sweden, happily married with three kids and a job with the state liquor monopoly.
In , she was interviewed by some Swedish computer related publication, and she was pleasantly amused by what had happened to her picture.
That was the first she knew of the use of that picture in the computer business. The editorial in the January issue of Optical Engineering v. However Wired mentionned that: "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".
Munson and the Transactions can forgive the copyright infringment, the departing Editor-in-chief's comments on the Lena deal are too good not to share with the group.
For those of you who are uninitiated in this brouhaha, let me provide a few facts. The original Lena image was a photograph of a Swedish woman named Lena Sjooblom, which appeared in the November issue of Playboy Magazine.
In English, Lena is sometimes spelled Lenna, to encourage proper pronunciation. The image was later digitized at the University of Southern California as one of many possible images for use by the research community. I think it is safe to assume that the Lena image became a standard in our "industry" for two reasons.
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. The Woody Allen buffs among you may be interested to know that the Lena image appeared in the movie Sleeper. Langdon Winner in his book The Whale and the Reactor , recounts a prominent example of biases being embedded in technologies involving early traffic overpasses in and around New York , many of which were built low.
This ended up blocking public buses from using the road. As a result, low-income people who depended entirely on public transport were effectively excluded from using these roads, and these same low-income people were disproportionally made up of racial minorities.
Winner argues that politics is built into everything we make, and that historical moral questions asked throughout history, including by Plato and Hannah Arendt, are questions relevant to technology — our experience of being free or unfree, the social arrangements that either foster equality or inequality, the kinds of institutions that hold and use power and authority.
The capabilities of AI, and the way that it is being used by corporations and governments, continue to raise these questions today. Current systems using facial recognition, or policing tools that reinforce prejudice, are examples of technology that builds on politics.
Lenna is the spelling in Playboy, Lena is the Swedish spelling of the name. In , she was interviewed by some Swedish computer related publication, and she was pleasantly amused by what had happened to her picture. That was the first she knew of the use of that picture in the computer business. Here's an excerpt: Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the USC 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 s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face.
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