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NB The correct spelling of her name is "Lena", but she asked Playboy to spell it "Lenna" because she did not want people to call her "Leena".
Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.
Lena’s path to iconhood began in the pages of Playboy. In 1972, at the age of 21, she appeared as Miss November, wearing nothing but a feathered sun hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa. (At her suggestion, the editors spelled her first name with an extra “n,” to encourage proper pronunciation. “I didn’t want to be called Leena,” she explained.)
About six months later, a copy of the issue turned up at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, where Alexander Sawchuk and his team happened to be looking for a new photograph against which to test their latest compression algorithm—the math that would make unwieldy image files manageable. Lena’s glossy centerfold, with its complex mixture of colors and textures, was the perfect candidate. They tore off the top third of the spread, ran it through a set of analog-to-digital converters, and saved the resulting 512-line scan to their Hewlett-Packard 2100. (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. According to James Hutchinson, an editor at the University of Illinois College of Engineering, Lena was for engineers “something like what Rita Hayworth was for US soldiers in the trenches of World War II.”
For almost as long as the Lenna has been idolized among computer scientists, however, it has also been a source of controversy. “I have heard feminists argue that the image should be retired,” David C. Munson Jr., current president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote back in 1996. 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. The image, she explained, had elicited “sexual comments” from the boys in her class, and its continuing inclusion in the curriculum was evidence of a broader “culture issue.”
Deanna Needell, a math professor at UCLA, had similar memories from college, so in 2013 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. “The prolific use of Lena’s photo can be seen as a harbinger of behavior within the tech industry,” she writes in the book’s opening chapter. “In Silicon Valley today, women are second-class citizens and most men are blind to it.” For Chang, the moment that Lena’s centerfold was torn and scanned marked “tech’s original sin.”
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 1997, at the same conference where she was given her beloved mantel clock. (WIRED ran a short article on the visit titled “Playmate Meets Geeks Who Made Her a Net Star.”)
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @04:01PM (29 children)
Scenario: computer scientist needs an image for something, grabs the first thing on hand.
what did these guys have on hand? the playboy magazine. say it anyway you'd like, but they were inconsiderate assholes. at a minimum they had playboy at work and they didn't think that this picture would actually be seen by a lot of people. to my shame, I always assumed it was someone's girlfriend and never bothered to check.
Russell A. Kirsch? a picture of his son (hence my naive conjecture that Lena was someone's girlfriend). at least some of us are not assholes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 18 2019, @04:32PM
Guys in their 20s enjoying looking at naked women is not something that should surprise or offend anyone at all. Especially guys who spend far more time staring at a screen than talking to women. Anything to the contrary is just as nonsensical, oppressive, and counter to human nature as puritanism.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @05:02PM (22 children)
The image used is entirely SFW, it's not even slightly risqué unless you consider the barest glimpse of an ambiguously uncovered top-of-a shoulder risqué. The NSFW providence is immaterial, I see no reason to care even slightly about it beyond copyright concerns (which I'm pretty shocked by their lack of concern for).
Could you please explain why you think they're an asshole? The only reason I can see is if they didn't have the rights to the image, which is a dick move to be sure if it's the case and it doesn't fall under fair use, but that doesn't seem to be your reason.
What was their conduct inconsiderate of which it ought to have considered?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @05:38PM
N/A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:14PM
definitely banned in Saudi Arabia
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:54PM (3 children)
It was risqué in the 1970s. Deodorant ads would show the product being applied to the forearm to not show a bare shoulder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @09:44PM
I had no idea norms had changed so rapidly, thanks for pointing that out. If it was risqué at the time then it was unprofessional and a bad choice.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:08AM
Shoulders were pretty common, look at I Dream of Jeannie, only the belly button was too risque. Kirk had kissed a black woman on TV years before and ads showing a little girls ass with a dog pulling her pants down were common. That last one might get you on the sex list now.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:51PM
You sure about that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEovBelBIow [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzB6_h-Iw2g [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @07:45PM (11 children)
the magazine existed in the university. this is stated explicitly in the abstract, and the magazine is NSFW.
they are inconsiderate because they used it in a publication, without considering the fact that any future discussion of their algorithm would be associated to the playboy magazine.
they saw no problem with it: as far as they could foresee, any future discussion of their algorithm would only involve people who are not offended that the picture was originally meant as male masturbation material.
I have absolutely no problem with Lena getting naked in front of a camera, and people jerking off to her picture.
By her later reactions, I get that she has no problem with her image being used for science or anything else either.
But she's seeing it from a different perspective: for her, this image was always about her, and sex, and her own interpretation of woman-man relations.
But why would any woman choose to work in IT when she discovers that people routinely bring nudie magazines to work in this field?
it's also questionable whether computer scientists take any woman seriously, or whether they just imagine her naked when she's trying to have proper conversations.
I'm not a psychologist or a people person, but my opinion is that choosing this image was wrong.
A picture of a glass of water would have done the same job just as well, maybe better (in the sense of glossy sharp lines).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @09:41PM (3 children)
This is a good point, I agree that was inappropriate. After thinking about it more, unless he'd bought it recently or it was in the bottom of a backpack or something, it's really damn strange. Like, he woke up and put that in his bag intending to flick through at work strange. (Assuming it wasn't from one of those magazine-piles waiting rooms and suchlike have.)
This isn't any more a problem than using a photo with a coke bottle in it. Sure, in a very small way it would associate the algorithm with Coke, but it's a tiny effect that just doesn't matter. JPG just doesn't bring Playboy to mind except as a footnote of the footnote mentioning this image.
I'm was pretty surprised a few years back when I realized people beyond art snobs cared about provenance. I'm still confused to this day why people care if, say, a mummy in a museum is real or a molecule-for-molecule perfect replica. Obviously such a copy couldn't really be made, but I've asked people this and equiv. questions before and some actually say they would strongly prefer the 'original'. Perhaps I'm abnormal in this, but people caring about the origin of a thing instead of focusing on the thing per se is shocking and confusing. I went through many wordings before accepting they weren't concerned about inaccurate replicas but rather the actual past of the thing, despite a hypothetical perfect replica being just as good for scientific study, providing just as much a connection to the past, etc.
I can't call not accounting for such lunacy wrong because I intentionally act as if people who believe walking under ladders is unlucky don't exist. If I'm ever in charge of laying out ladders on scaffolding, I will make absolutely no concessions to such people. If I'm ever in charge of designing an elevator, I will include floor 13 &c&c. Pandering to nonsense is a bad idea because it lends an air of legitimacy to it.
A good policy is to treat all people as if they're sensible, and hope the lack of shits society gives about their concern will shame them away from it, much like you yourself are probably doing to the folks who think they're allergic to cell phones or people who want to avoid evil spirits and demand you take a different road; they shouldn't be taken seriously. So too people who are offended about something so silly. One couldn't look at the image and realize the origin, the image is entirely and literally SFW and it seems to me as complaining that a person is naked under their clothing. Sure, they are, but they are in fact wearing clothing so it doesn't matter.
I wouldn't care if Das Kapital, the Bible, or some terrorist's manifesto was used to benchmark text compression because it literally doesn't matter (so long as the texts are otherwise suitable for use). It just doesn't even slightly matter if DEFLATE was tested on ISIS propaganda or cat memes. It's entirely irrelevant, nobody should care, and so we should act as if nobody does. The choice itself may cast aspersions on the character of the person (bringing a playboy to work is a little creepy), but isn't at all relevant to the work itself. Unless you know or work with the guy, it literally doesn't matter.
Provided they reasonably believed she and the rightsholder were ok with their use of it then what it means to her doesn't matter at all, just that she's ok with their use.
Consider a person sexually interested in trees, who photographs the greatest trees they can find with the intent of creating pornography for themselves, and becomes skilled at capturing trees. These images are nontheless perfectly suitable for inclusion in a children's book on tree identification. Provenance doesn't matter, and nor does authorial intent.
I hardly think that's a reasonable inference from a single prominent case.
A person who would hear of someone bringing a porno mag to work and seriously question whether many others in the profession are such ravening sex-addicts as you describe needs to retake statistics until selection bias and baye's thm is burned into their intuition a little better. One may as well conclude that people who dress the same, or people who have the same skin colour are sex fiends instead of people who share the profession.
You want a human face to ensure you don't push it into the uncanny valley; and you want detail at a bunch of different scales since FT->lowpass filter->inverse FT is the core of JPG IIRC and this makes tuning that threshold easier; you want DOF blur which crappy point-and-shoots probably wouldn't do well. In short they need to hire some cameras/lenses, or a photographer, or just grab an existing image.
I wouldn't have any idea where to find stock photography catalogs without the internet, I suppose I'd phone graphic designers from the yellow pages and ask them. Grabbing something from an art book/magazine is the best option since it only requires a trip to the library, and definitely the one to go for if it falls under fair use. A photography coffee-table book* would probably have been a better source due to the variety of images providing more selection than playboy and so probably leading to a better final image.
So I agree it wasn't the best choice, with the caveat that it was a good choice of image, but with the wider selection of a photo-book* it could have been better. This is purely considering the suitability for the task, not the origin, for the same reason I actively ignore whether the paper he wrote had 13 pages even if I happen to notice it.
*I don't know the name of books containing a selection of a photographers work.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @09:53PM
that photo contrary to a photo of a coke bottle has all the kind of feature you want to test an image processing algorithm. the photo has saturated color, skin tones (that are hard to get rigth) , and a mix of low, mid and high frequencies details.
(Score: 4, Informative) by driverless on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:24AM (1 child)
When we were doing image processing work, no-one knew where "Lenna" came from, it was just a standard image used for testing. We just assumed it was some reference image from the likes of Kodak. Not sure why Kodak specifically, it just looked Kodakky.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:29AM
It looks "Kodakky" because of the saturation and colour, which were similar to how Kodachrome looked iirc. The development processes have also changed. Colour film now has much deeper darks, etc.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @09:42PM
You must be American, where a bare nipple gets a movie into the M rating category, but violence is just fine and dandy at PG.
In the USA: Pain/death == Good. Pleasure/life == Bad.
Now that is one fucked up set of morals.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Spamalope on Monday February 18 2019, @10:07PM
But why would any woman choose to work in IT when she discovers that people routinely bring nudie magazines to work in this field?
Why would this prove or disprove that? Evidence is for that is not at hand. This could be explained if only the torn off portion was brought to work.
I worked at a 95% female company for a number of years. Once they got to know me and that I wasn't the type of person to point a finger and denounce something as problematic they treated me as one of the gang. The women absolutely had the guys beat for locker room talk. It's people being people. What's with trying to strip folks of their humanity and judge them for their ability to emulate automatons?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday February 19 2019, @02:49AM (3 children)
It's NSFW today, not then. This was the 1970s. A friend of mine used Penthouse as a reference in his mid-70s PhD thesis, which he got from his university library.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:15AM (2 children)
Playboy was always kinda artsy as well. I'm glad my porn started with Playboy rather then something really raunchy. Beautiful pictures of women, what's wrong with that?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday February 19 2019, @10:14AM (1 child)
It wasn't even the pr0n in this case, it was because Penthouse was prepared to publish stories about Vietnam and the military that no-one else would touch. They actually did some serious journalism at the time, so his best reference for several things he need to point to ended up being a porn mag.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:35PM
Good point. Both Playboy and Penthouse were actually worth reading for the articles.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday February 19 2019, @11:37AM
Actually, imagining the audience naked is a common technique for coping with nerves / anxiety, it goes back decades (at least), and it isn't gender dependent either.
The original source for the advice seems to be public speaking, but there are a whole class of people who struggle with human interaction to the extent that an audience of one will trigger anxiety. It just so happens that those people are overrepresented in computer science. If your hypothetical woman can't cope with conversation with autistic folk then maybe she should go and have "proper conversation" working in a field populated by neurotypicals.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday February 18 2019, @10:15PM (1 child)
In the 70's every machine shop and mechanic's garage had centerfolds up on the walls. It was the norm.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:33AM
And in warehousing, shipping, all stripes of manufacturing.
ULINE still sends out centrefold calendars, for chrissakes, they just have some skimpy thing on now.
When I go into a site, if that (it's the most common) or similar is the splash of colour on the wall, it sends a particular message about the company culture.
Pretty pictures, though.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday February 19 2019, @02:46AM (1 child)
It's also the perfect image to use for checking an image rendering/processing algorithm. The most-photographed things in existence are human faces, so you want a human face as your reference. This particular image has continuous tones (her arm), detail (the boa, top of the hat), light and shade, pretty much everything you need in a reference image. If I were choosing an image today it'd still be a human face, probably a reasonably attractive one since endless numbers of people are going to have to look at it in detail to assess the image-processing-algorithm's effectiveness. The SJWs are busy turning it into a grand conspiracy to oppress wimmin or whatever they want it to be, but it's the logical choice for a test image that's meant to be representative of the images that people would be generating in real life.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dry on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:17AM
Actually it is as much the Conservatives who are freaking out about a nudy, even with the lower part not there. Seems the extremists on both sides are extreme.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 18 2019, @05:14PM (3 children)
Well, DUH! She WAS someone's girl friend. She was Hugh's girl friend, for at least a little while. If you're interested in how many guys called her girl friend over the years, you might track her down, and ask.
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Monday February 18 2019, @05:54PM (2 children)
Umm, no? The story mentions that she was invited to visit Hugh Heffner at his mansion, but declined the invitation.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 18 2019, @06:29PM (1 child)
But, she got naked for him?
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 18 2019, @09:47PM
For his photographer, yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @06:01AM
I've bought one Playboy in my life and it was to read a specific science article in it.
A quick search and I can't find the index of what else was in that particular issue, but it's entirely possible that it wasn't bought to look at naked women. Playboy really did do serious in-depth articles. I did find one review that said there were 14 pages of nude photo shoots plus 6 pages of film stills in that 280 page issue.
If you wanted nudie pics, Playboy wasn't a cost effective way to get them.