
Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs - lelf
https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of-jpegs/
======
ChuckMcM
Oh that is fun, I was one of the operators at the USC Image Processing
Institute who did scanning, ran the systems (initially a the HP2100, then a
PDP 11/40, and later a PDP 11/55t. We did lots of tours and we had a number of
graduate students working on various issues. One of the things we did was to
provide the 512 x 512 set of reference images on 1600BPI magnetic tape to
researchers. Each image was stored as a red image, green image, and blue image
(8 bits per pixel for 24 bits total). In addition to Lena there were other
standard images that involved repeating texture, lots of lines and edges, and
variable frequency details. By using the standard images, two algorithms could
be compared using their output on the same standard image. This helped
researchers in the field compare their work with other published studies.

~~~
saagarjha
The images (well, most of them) are online:
[http://sipi.usc.edu/database/](http://sipi.usc.edu/database/)

~~~
aboutruby
> Please note that we no longer distribute the following images that were
> previously available in our database: 4.2.04 (lena), 4.2.02 (tiffany),
> elaine.512, numbers.512 and testpat.1k. Although these images have played a
> significant role in the history of image processing, they no longer
> represent the best examples for future research.

~~~
GuB-42
It there a reason why these images "no longer represent the best examples for
future research"?

How is Lena inferior to the other "female" images? Lena seems to offer a good
mix of highly detailed textures, smooth gradients and sharp edges. Maybe there
are copyright reasons but Playboy seems to be fine with the use that the Lena
image is made of.

~~~
ska
Lena is problematic for technical reasons, it’s not PC pushback. The scanning
technology of the time was somewhat limited, and the exact parameters are not
known if I recall correctly. And of course it is fairly low resolution by
current standards. It’s a scan of a reproduction of a production image on
magazine paper - something quite different than a photograph. All of these
processes introduce characteristic degradations of the image.

I seem to recall someone approaching playboy to see of the negatives where
available to make a new “standard” version but I don’t know of that got
anywhere. At any rate, there are several subtly different versions around,
which has caused some issues in the past.

Lena originally became popular not because people liked looking at a pretty
face (though I don’t imagine that hurt) but because it has quite a bit of
variation in texture, with strong and weak edges, etc. Particularly for image
compression research, it was a real challenge in the 80s and 90s.

All of the technical challenges are better represented these days by other
image sets, that don’t have the drawbacks I mentioned. And of course it is
much easier to produce your own sets now, and evaluate performance over a
significant number of images...

~~~
IshKebab
There are plenty of other even lower resolution images in the set that they
haven't removed.

~~~
afiori
Low resolution was not part of the motivations presented. The main one, IMO,
were that it is highly processed and that there were a few slightly different
copies going around making ambiguous which one did people actually use.

Also I would personally add that the level of exposure received could by
itself warrant removal from a bigger set, since it would still be used as an
example anyway and could skew informal perception.

------
iamleppert
What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m
not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t
think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the
same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they
visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female
sculptures?

I know nudity and even a slight sexual undertone in anything upsets some
people, but I don’t understand why. I think it says something more about the
person than our culture. Sexuality is a core part of the human experience and
to deny it is to remove that part of our humanity.

~~~
yawaramin
Because it's not about you. It's about the women who see the image, understand
its history, and see it as another reminder of how tech is not just male-
dominated but thoughtlessly so (having _Playboy_ issues lying around in the
research lab) and where women are literally reduced to objects. From the
article:

> “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told
> me.

Women notice stuff like that, I guess.

~~~
v64
I think it's important to keep in mind that Lena Forsen (and the other models
of Playboy) made the decision to be photographed nude and to have those photos
published as a creative expression. To portray the exhibition as exploitative
robs them of their agency and demeans their decision.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
As long as a "gun" is held to our collective heads stating 'you will surrender
your bodies to work or starve on the street', there is no such thing as making
a voluntary decision like what you say. Look no further than the article:

> “I didn’t really know what that was,” she told me. “But my husband, he
> thought it was kind of cool, and it was money, and I didn’t have a lot of
> money.”

And what did she get?

> After her centerfold photos were published, Lena, green card in hand, got a
> divorce and a new boyfriend.

Even faced with lack of money for food and rent, still got a divorce out of
it. Which in '71 , was still considered an abomination.

Don't get me wrong. Men also trade their bodies for the same existential
threat; being deprived of food and shelter. But instead of being valued for
beauty, we're valued for our utility. And too, our bodies break and rot under
harsher conditions.

Only ones who automate and make others' lives meaningless get further than the
rest - which I think adequately explains IT in a nutshell. Frankly, its only
time until we're also due the same fate.

~~~
v64
I disagree with the characterization that it's comparable to a gun to the
head. In Lena's case, she was offered a way to make money, she considered the
decision, took it, then used the money she made to start an independent life
for herself. She declines Hugh Hefner's offer because that crosses a line for
her. How does any of this suggest the desperation of starvation?

At the end of the day, her perspective matters the most:

> Lena doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Sawchuk and his imitators for how
> they appropriated her image; the only note of regret she expressed was that
> she wasn’t better compensated. In her view, the photograph is an immense
> accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really
> proud of that picture,” she said.

She's proud of it. Don't deprive her of that.

~~~
eecc
Besides, in a world obsessed with copyright and take-downs would her image
have circulated so much today? Would she have become so iconic to enter our
collective unconscious?

She’s like the Amen Break.

------
FartyMcFarter
> The small army of women who had worked as so-called computers during the
> first half of the 20th century were leaving the tech industry in droves, as
> computing went from being perceived as a form of menial labor to a more
> cerebral, masculine pursuit.

Isn't this rather misleading? Obviously there were women in early computing
who were very influential. But weren't the "human computers" in fact
performing tedious and repetitive calculations, and not merely "perceived" as
such?

~~~
regularfry
No, it's not misleading. The change was in perception, not in the nature of
the task. Yes, there were women who did rote calculations, but those weren't
the roles influential to how the role evolved.

~~~
erik_seaberg
"Programmer" used to be the job of turning prose or flowcharts from a "systems
analyst" into a deck of machine instructions. The uncreative grunt work making
up half of the profession got completely automated away.

~~~
analog31
I know a person who had that kind of job, and eventually started fixing bugs
in the code because it was easier than tracking down the analyst. She
gradually morphed into being a full fledged programmer in the contemporary
sense, now nearing retirement.

------
59nadir
Lena Forsén*

You'd think, having written a whole article about her, you'd be able to spell
her name right. It's incredible to me how relaxed people in English speaking
countries, particularly the US, are with removing and changing letters as they
see fit.

I remember seeing someone on Reddit, for example, who had named their kid
Soren, after Søren Kierkegaard, completely ignoring that it's not even the
same name. Do people realize that these letters are different looking for a
reason?

~~~
rococode
Isn't that just how language works? When a name doesn't suit your language's
writing system it's natural to adapt it in a way that's more accessible.
English simply doesn't have an acute accent.

It's why people in English speaking countries are named Michael (or one of the
50+ alternatives) instead of the original מִיכָאֵל, or why BBC reports on
Chinese President Xi Jinping instead of Chinese President 习近平.

~~~
lelf
But it’s completely fine/effortless to use it in English, it’s even part of
latin-1.

Fiancée résumé déjà vu touché.

~~~
Jare
I'm spanish, with dual keyboard layout which means easy access to deadkeys for
those chars, and I don't even bother putting the accent in my own name when
I'm writing English.

------
jordigh
I feel that whenever Lena is mentioned, we should also give a shoutout to the
researchers who were fed up with her and decided to use Fabio instead.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6429](https://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6429)

What do you guys (yes, guys) think about making Fabio the standard image
instead?

~~~
taneq
I'd have no issue with it, but then I have no issue with the Lena image. Of
course, anyone who does have an issue with Lena would have equal issue with a
male equivalent, if they're not a hypocrite.

~~~
cedex12
> if they're not a hypocrite.

I don't agree at all with your statement here. There is a whole
historical/social difference at play here; taking it into account doesn't make
you a hypocrite.

(I hate the "hypocrite" judgement. So easy to cast and rarely true)

~~~
taneq
Well I hate the way that "it's OK to do something to a person of one
race/gender/subgroup that it's not OK to do to a person of a different
race/gender/subgroup, for some historical reason" has become the new
justification for all sorts of prejudice, so I guess we're even.

~~~
yesenadam
Please don't do this on HN.[0]

>Of course, anyone who does have an issue with Lena would have equal issue
with a male equivalent, if they're not a hypocrite.

Part of cedex12's point, I take it, is that there _is_ no 'male equivalent'.
Your 'of course' following by accusation of hypocrisy makes it seem you were
looking for a fight, not a discussion, and mainly wanted to dump out the
standard 'talking point' which followed. "Of course" is just bluff, begging
the question, code for "I have no reason to give but I'm right, obviously".
No, you're not "even".

(I do however disagree with cedex12's claim that accusations of human
hypocrisy are rarely true.)

[0] I dislike like the sound of me saying that. I tried removing it, but I
disliked the implied acceptance of the way you were speaking on here even
less, so I put it back.

------
Jun8
In addition to _lenna_ old timer image processing researchers would also have
fond (depending whether your compression or edge detection algorithm worked
correctly or not) memories of _girl_ , _cameraman_ , and _barbara_ images as
well as the infamous _baboon_
([https://goo.gl/images/4Js7YH](https://goo.gl/images/4Js7YH)).

I remember doing my senior thesis on 2D LPC in 1990 and since we did not know
how to print images, in our report we just printed the pixel values as
numbers. Ahh, the good old times.

~~~
toolslive
infamous mandrill, I think it is. Anyway, that picture in full colour has a
definite wow-factor.

[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Original-standard-
test-i...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Original-standard-test-image-
of-Mandrill-also-known-as-Baboon_fig9_259521525)

------
5555624
> Yet the model herself (right, now 67) remained mostly a mystery—until now.

Not exactly, there is even a web site about it --
[http://www.lenna.org/](http://www.lenna.org/) \-- and both she and the image
have Wikipedia entries.

------
xellisx
I thought the image was used to test formats well before JPEG.

------
loosetypes
I wasn't aware of the compared cases from the article such as Suzanne Vega,
"The Mother of the MP3", or Susan Bennett, the namesake for Siri.

But I have heard that a 3d model of Thom Yorke (Radiohead)'s head is the de
facto standard for 3d printer trials.

~~~
abricot
So it isn't Benchy?

------
dav
Did she actually still have the same hat and scarf? I didn't notice that
mentioned in the text.

~~~
saagarjha
The new one looks slightly different: it has a different texture on the
underside of the brim. It’s likely that the original hat belonged to
_Playboy_.

------
ralusek
"In 1973, at the moment that her picture was being brought into the lab, there
were hundreds if not thousands of women being pushed out,” said Marie Hicks, a
historian of technology and author of Programmed Inequality.1 “All this
happened for a reason. If they hadn’t used a Playboy centerfold, they almost
certainly would have used another picture of a pretty white woman. The Playboy
thing gets our attention, but really what it’s about is this world-building
that’s gone on in computing from the beginning—it’s about building worlds for
certain people and not for others."

This is the thesis of the article, if you don't want to waste your time
reading through the banal padding of a story around it.

~~~
Walf
It's definitely pushing an agenda, with a whiff of product placement, too.
It's a bit of an absurd conclusion they're drawing. Sure, continuing to use a
centerfold picture is sexist, but the picture was only a tool and - unlike the
article implies - there is no 'spirit' of Lena inside my family photos.

