

The Lenna story - motters
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/

======
Caligula
This is amusing. I did my undergraduate thesis on expanding my professors work
on block truncation coding for image compression and this is the image that
was used. I always figured my prof used it because it was a pretty woman and I
even recall the filename was lena.raw.

~~~
SlyShy
As stated, it really is the defacto image used in image processing
communities. Much like the Utah Teapot
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot>), which you might recognize from
using 3DSMax or similar software.

~~~
phillaf
or tsukuba(<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clz/Exam1Real.jpg>) in stereovision

------
phillaf
I study in computer vision. One of the professors in our department had some
of his papers refused by some publishers. They thought it was morally
unacceptable to put a playmate's face in the paper.

~~~
Rod
I applaud such moral rectitude. After all, people who regularly accept grants
from the military in order to develop, say, automatic target recognition
systems, cannot possibly blemish their immaculate reputation by publishing a
cropped image of a tasteful, artistic photo of a gorgeous naked woman.

Looks like all the rumours about the academics' lack of _testicular fortitude_
have been confirmed...

------
motters
Until reading this I had no idea about the background story to this classic
test image. It's faintly amusing, given the contemporary hysteria surrounding
copyright, that the cropped face of Lenna was actually a flagrant copyright
violation which has been perpetrated in academic papers for decades.

------
lsb
I wonder how much of an image corpus you can get from Wikimedia (CC) files.

~~~
celoyd
You could find much better test images, that’s for sure. Lenna looks like what
it is: old-style film printed fairly well and then scanned fairly well. It has
a strong color cast and no full black. It’s only used everywhere because it’s
already used everywhere.

------
nandemo
I had never seen the original, full picture. There's something in the
background that's somewhat disturbing...

~~~
winter_blue
Is it the baby doll?

------
Rod
More links:

<http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html>

<http://ndevilla.free.fr/lena/>

