Lena Soderberg - Image processing standard

For all those who are familiar with image processing or those with a technical acumen, you would be familiar with the "Lenna" or "Lena" picture which is the most widely used standard test images.

Now, WHY THIS PICTURE ??

For the curious mind, 'Lena' or 'Lenna' is a digitized Playboy centerfold !!!, from the November 1972 issue (I assume that you know what a Playboy centerfold is). Lenna is the spelling in Playboy, Lena is the Swedish spelling of the name.

Here is the original picture, "all of Lenna" ....he he he...... ( WARNING: It contains nudity :d )http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/714/2863/1600/Lenna_full.0.jpg

More detials about its origin ..................
Here's an excerpt from the May 2001 Newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society by Jamie Hutchinson.

"Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June orJuly of 1973 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 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy. The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512 x 512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders."

And here is my lovely Lenna in 1997.