
Keeping Abreast of Pornographic Research in Computer Science - nreece
http://gandolf.homelinux.org/~smhanov/blog/?id=63
======
Rod
The author claims that the Lena image is porn. Give me a break!

~~~
almost
As explained in the article it's the top half of a playboy centerfold (there's
a link to the full version in there).

~~~
Rod
I have worked in image processing and I have looked at Lena many times. I know
it's the top half of a Playboy centerfold:

<http://www.lenna.org/full/len_full.html>

What I see is a rather artistic photo. It surely contains nudity, but it's
nonetheless a work of art. If nudity is porn, then Picasso was a pornographer:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d'Avignon>

And Feynman was also a pornographer then:

<http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=11504>

To cut a long story short. Just because there's nudity, it doesn't mean it's
porn. Are we, HN'ers, that prude??

~~~
donaq
It's not a question of being prudes. The definition of pornography is
"sexually explicit pictures, writing or other material whose primary purpose
is to cause sexual arousal". I think we can all agree that Playboy fits that
definition. Hence, the full Lena picture _is_ porn by definition. Secondly,
labeling it as porn can only be considered prude behaviour if you're offended
by porn. Personally, I do not find porn offensive. Do you? Lastly, something
can be pornography and still be artistic. I think the real prudes are those
who think that there can be no overlap between art and porn.

~~~
Rod
You wrote:

 _"Hence, the full Lena picture is porn by definition."_

The author wrote:

 _"One cannot do research in image processing without an encounter with Lena
(pronounced Lenna). The image of the woman with a feathered hat has become the
de-facto test image for many algorithms, and appears in thousands of articles
and conference papers. And it is porn."_

So, the author is claiming that the image that is showed in all those
scientific papers is porn. And that image is not the full Lena image. Thus,
according to your definition, the author seems to get aroused by women's faces
and feathered hats. I rest my case...

~~~
donaq
Well, if we really must...

The definition merely states that material is pornographic if its primary
_purpose_ is to appeal to the erotic instincts, without mentioning that it
actually has to _succeed_. It can be easily shown that this is also the
commonly understood definition by making the simple observation that most
people would agree that granny porn _is_ still porn by virtue of the fact that
it was created with the intent to arouse, even if neither you nor I are, in
fact, aroused by it. In other words, you _have_ no case, even if I were
referring to that, which I wasn't. (Incidentally, that definition came from a
dictionary, and is not "my definition", just so we're clear.) Now that we've
established that the author need not have been aroused by a picture for it to
be considered porn, we can, I suppose, argue forever and a day about whether
the author was referring to the full Lena picture or not when he said it was
porn, but I won't do that. I interpret it as the author referring to Playboy,
the source of the picture, which is by definition porn, but if you interpret
it to mean that the author is saying that pictures of "women's faces and
feathered hats" are porn, well, then we must agree to disagree, even if I
think that is a weird position to take :)

Now, to get down to cases, in the comment I was actually replying to, what
_you_ said was this:

 _What I see is a rather artistic photo. It surely contains nudity, but it's
nonetheless a work of art._

Since Lena as used in CS does not contain nudity, you must have been referring
to the original Playboy picture, which I doubt you can honestly argue was not
created with the intention of appealing to the erotic instincts.

~~~
Rod
I agree with you. I don't want to keep discussing what is and what is not
entitled to be labeled as porn, though. On the other hand, we have the word
"nudity" which is more specific than the word "porn". The full Lena image
qualifies as nudity for sure. Moreover, there can be porn without nudity.
Whatever...

