7 ms·

The Rest of the Lenna Story

103 points by david4096 13y ago

sillysaurus2 13y ago
I wish he'd post the scan of the original, rather than the JPG of the scan of the original. Then we might be able to use it for compression research. It's not about wanting to see nudity. The original is useful because humans are hardwired to recognize nudity. It's not a coincidence that tasteful nude pictures are considered fine art. There are literally a hundred thousand tiny features that are lost by cropping the image to her face and shoulders. Those features are much easier to compare than, say, pictures of nature. Artifacts introduced into pictures of leaves and grass are far less noticeable than artifacts introduced in the subtle variation of the colors across her back.
- volaski 13y ago
  the TIFF file is included on the page
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    Sadly not the uncropped version. There's a high-res version of the uncropped original, but it's JPG, which is inherently unsuitable for compression testing.
    - geedy 13y ago
      They go on to say that the photo had to be cropped due to the equipment they were using. "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 shoulder."
      - jmspring 13y ago
        The description of the scanner and approach are probably my favorite part of the technical aspect of the story.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mynameishere 13y ago
  Then we might be able to use it for compression research. Unless they got the negative from playboy, I don't think it's an appropriate image to use anymore.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    Really? That's very interesting. What terms should I search for in order to find out for more about why negatives are so important? Or is it just the fact that photography back then was done with negatives, and anything but the original photo is unsuitable for compression research?
    - brazzy 13y ago
      a 512x512 pixel scan of a printed image really isn't ideal source material. Nowadays you definitely want something larger, and to get that in good quality you need the negatives.
- carterschonwald 13y ago
  Surely playboy keeps the negatives for all their materials. Might be possible to reach out to them for a high quality scan. Anyways, you're absolutely right, people's brains are very very very much optimized for evaluating the microfeatures in a person's appearance, so its actually the right perceptual way to benchmark lossy compression (or at least one very good way).
- frozenport 13y ago
  From a cursory search on eBay, you can buy the original magazine and do the image processing community a favor. http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.Xlenna+playboy&_nkw=lenna+playboy&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...
- dalke 13y ago
  I don't understand your comment. Why would this nude, of all of the nude images that exist, have any special importance in compression research? Other than historical reasons, of course. For example, the colors and registration will be different than the original image, so it's not like a new scan will identically include the same pixels as the old scan. If a new scan is from the paper copy, then there might have been a change in the ink colors over time. If the new scan is from the negative then there's a difference between that color and what was printed. You claim that "humans are hardwired to recognize nudity." Is that really true or is it a hypthosis? How was this tested? What is the signal difference between fully nude and partially nude? In the Lenna case, she is not completely nude - how will that confound the results? Does wearing a bikini affect the results? What about gloves? A cummerbund? I grew up in a white-dominated culture and have more experience with white skin. I've noticed that it's easier for me to identify white skin than black skin. This suggests that recognition has a strong learned component. In those tests, how was the influence of that learned behavior disentangled? Is the 'hardwired' recognition due specifically to nudity or is it to the transgression of cultural norms? That is, some cultures de-emphasize nudity as being something other than just a person without clothes. This is not generally true of US culture. I can conjecture that there is a hard-wired system to see if a person is following cultural norms, so in the US, nudity would stick out more than in cultures where casual nudity is more common. Now that I think about it, any hardwired signal like this should be easy to test. Have an array of, say, 10x10 photographs, where one is nude and the others are wearing appropriately skin-tone clothes (fully dressed, partially dressed, etc). Then time how long it takes to find the nude person. This test can be done across multiple cultures pretty easily, so long as nude images are tolerated. This is similar to the studies I've read about done on facial expressions, to show that some are very cross-cultural and thus likely more hard-wired, while others are not and thus more likely to be learned. For example, as your baseline reference, use a similar 10x10 grid but where one person is frowning while the others have a neutral face, and time how long it takes to find the frowning person. Since it sounds quite simple to carry out, I figure it's been done, so if that's the sort of work you're referring to, can you kindly point it out? A Google search gets bogged down with references to algorithm for detecting nudity in images.
cperciva 13y ago
Where would Computer Science be without pornography?
- hnha 13y ago
  It's erotica, not pornography. You are using a more controversial "disgusting" term in a low quality comment to denounce the matter.
- Eleanor_Erwin 13y ago
  my neighbor's sister-in-law makes $81/hr on the laptop. She has been out of a job for 5 months but last month her payment was $19483 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Get the facts..... http://7.ly/6gn http://7.ly/6gn
- afhof 13y ago
  Its not so much that the image is pornographic, the interesting part is that most computer graphics group is male. If there was a 50/50 male to female split, I doubt this image would have become the de facto test case.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    Eh, as a graphics researcher, I'd say it's not a gender issue. Anyone who spends a significant amount of time researching the human visual system in a fair an unbiased way is inexorably pulled to the conclusion that comparing pictures of nude bodies is one of the major tests of whether you're achieving acceptable results, whether you're making a painting or developing a compression algorithm. Humans are hardwired to notice details in naked bodies, possibly moreso than faces (or at least we notice a different set of details than faces). They were onto something important when they chose the Lenna picture, and it's a shame that the original had to be cropped due to technical limitations. And it shouldn't be taboo to use a male model any more than a female one -- both are equally important.
    - skybrian 13y ago
      Do you want to have more female co-workers or not? Working with nude images when you don't really need to is a great way to discourage people from working with you.
jmspring 13y ago
In the 90s, Lena was pretty much one of the images you spent a lot of time looking at if you were in compression research. It was part of a standard set of images we were always comparing agains. I want to say the last time I ran across mention of Lena was either here on HN or through a rant of Charles Bloom -- http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com I do find the story fascinating each time I read it.
NelsonMinar 13y ago
We need a modern Lenna, with a nude man holding a strategically placed Utah teapot.
afhof 13y ago
Why did use Lenna? "Two reason was stated in "A Note on Lena" by David C. Munson. First, the Lenna image contains a nice mixture of detail, flat regions, shading, and texture that do a good job of testing various image processing algorithms. It is a good test image! Second, the Lena image is a picture of an attractive woman. It is not surprising that the (mostly male) image processing research community gravitated toward an image that they found attractive. " http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html
idbfs 13y ago
Two female image processing researchers recently used a picture of Fabio as a test image in a paper of theirs: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6429 http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6429 (Additional discussion at http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/246 http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/246) Personally, I'm all for the use of amusing (arousing?) test images, as long as they exhibit features that actually make for a good test image (a mix of flat and textured regions, sharp boundaries, etc.).
networked 13y ago
The original Lenna image is still copyrighted and will remain so for a while (even if right now Playboy Enterprises, Inc. has decided to not sue people over its use in research) and people can't seem to agree on a standard replacement [1]. Since that is the case, how about a Kickstarter campaign to recreate the 512x512 image as close a possible and distribute the imitation under a free license? I.e., you could hire a professional model (by running a Lenna double contest online?) and a pro photographer, recreate the environment and the props, etc. Keep it clean (no remaking the full nude) and you could get free press and support from the researchers themselves. [1] Though you can find links to a good number of alternative image sets at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_test_image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_test_image.
eCa 13y ago
"Lenna's issue (November 1972) was Playboy's best selling issue ever and sold 7,161,561 copies." "Very few people have seen the complete original picture." Do most people that buy Playboy stop reading before getting to the centerfold?
- frozenport 13y ago
  if you were born in 1952 you would be over 60.
aaron695 13y ago
Researchers decided to use a picture from a playboy, a magazine that thinks chicks nude are kinda all they are good for (come off it if you seriously think they don't)and we all think it's ok and want to continue it in the comments. Yes, it's history, like rape and pillaging. Yes things of old are cool cause they happened ages ago. But get over it. Nothing against Lenna, cause she was in the industry, but the fact anyone thinks it's cool to bring a playboy into a place of research offends me to the point of boredom.
vr000m 13y ago
So there is at least one scientific paper (image processing) out there which references Playboy (I wonder if Google Scholar has a citation index for this?)
throwaway_068 13y ago
It's perfectly reasonable that image processing and television are optimized for accurate skin tones. But they are optimizing for light skin tones by using test images such as Lenna, the BBC's test image [A], and the BBC's "Flesh Tone Reference Card" [C]. I think this harms image quality for dark skin tones. Television broadcast systems include automatic skin tone correction that "looks for colors in a specific [colorspace] area and any colors within that area are made a color that is closer to the skin tone." There's actually a "correct" skin tone and colors are adjusted to be closer to it. This is implemented in chips [D] for TV signal processing and even at the LCD panel controller level. I've noticed reproduction of dark skin colors is much worse on video conferencing than light skin colors, so this isn't just a theoretical complaint. [A] http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2012/apr/22/the-test-card-girl-and-clown http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2012/apr/2... [B] http://www.videointerchange.com/color_correction1.htm http://www.videointerchange.com/color_correction1.htm [C] http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9780750683951/chapter-9dot-ntsc-and-pal-digital-encoding-and-decoding/432 http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9780750683951/chapter... [D] Examples are the TDA884X PAL/NTSC/SECAM TV processors, SAA7154 video decoder, and the TW8817 LCD controller.

103 points by david4096 13y ago

I wish he'd post the scan of the original, rather than the JPG of the scan of the original. Then we might be able to use it for compression research. It's not about wanting to see nudity. The original is useful because humans are hardwired to recognize nudity. It's not a coincidence that tasteful nude pictures are considered fine art. There are literally a hundred thousand tiny features that are lost by cropping the image to her face and shoulders. Those features are much easier to compare than, say, pictures of nature. Artifacts introduced into pictures of leaves and grass are far less noticeable than artifacts introduced in the subtle variation of the colors across her back.

volaski 13y ago
the TIFF file is included on the page
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Sadly not the uncropped version. There's a high-res version of the uncropped original, but it's JPG, which is inherently unsuitable for compression testing.
  - geedy 13y ago
    They go on to say that the photo had to be cropped due to the equipment they were using. "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 shoulder."
    - jmspring 13y ago
      The description of the scanner and approach are probably my favorite part of the technical aspect of the story.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mynameishere 13y ago
Then we might be able to use it for compression research. Unless they got the negative from playboy, I don't think it's an appropriate image to use anymore.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Really? That's very interesting. What terms should I search for in order to find out for more about why negatives are so important? Or is it just the fact that photography back then was done with negatives, and anything but the original photo is unsuitable for compression research?
  - brazzy 13y ago
    a 512x512 pixel scan of a printed image really isn't ideal source material. Nowadays you definitely want something larger, and to get that in good quality you need the negatives.
carterschonwald 13y ago
Surely playboy keeps the negatives for all their materials. Might be possible to reach out to them for a high quality scan. Anyways, you're absolutely right, people's brains are very very very much optimized for evaluating the microfeatures in a person's appearance, so its actually the right perceptual way to benchmark lossy compression (or at least one very good way).
frozenport 13y ago
From a cursory search on eBay, you can buy the original magazine and do the image processing community a favor. http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.Xlenna+playboy&_nkw=lenna+playboy&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...
dalke 13y ago
I don't understand your comment. Why would this nude, of all of the nude images that exist, have any special importance in compression research? Other than historical reasons, of course. For example, the colors and registration will be different than the original image, so it's not like a new scan will identically include the same pixels as the old scan. If a new scan is from the paper copy, then there might have been a change in the ink colors over time. If the new scan is from the negative then there's a difference between that color and what was printed. You claim that "humans are hardwired to recognize nudity." Is that really true or is it a hypthosis? How was this tested? What is the signal difference between fully nude and partially nude? In the Lenna case, she is not completely nude - how will that confound the results? Does wearing a bikini affect the results? What about gloves? A cummerbund? I grew up in a white-dominated culture and have more experience with white skin. I've noticed that it's easier for me to identify white skin than black skin. This suggests that recognition has a strong learned component. In those tests, how was the influence of that learned behavior disentangled? Is the 'hardwired' recognition due specifically to nudity or is it to the transgression of cultural norms? That is, some cultures de-emphasize nudity as being something other than just a person without clothes. This is not generally true of US culture. I can conjecture that there is a hard-wired system to see if a person is following cultural norms, so in the US, nudity would stick out more than in cultures where casual nudity is more common. Now that I think about it, any hardwired signal like this should be easy to test. Have an array of, say, 10x10 photographs, where one is nude and the others are wearing appropriately skin-tone clothes (fully dressed, partially dressed, etc). Then time how long it takes to find the nude person. This test can be done across multiple cultures pretty easily, so long as nude images are tolerated. This is similar to the studies I've read about done on facial expressions, to show that some are very cross-cultural and thus likely more hard-wired, while others are not and thus more likely to be learned. For example, as your baseline reference, use a similar 10x10 grid but where one person is frowning while the others have a neutral face, and time how long it takes to find the frowning person. Since it sounds quite simple to carry out, I figure it's been done, so if that's the sort of work you're referring to, can you kindly point it out? A Google search gets bogged down with references to algorithm for detecting nudity in images.

cperciva 13y ago

Where would Computer Science be without pornography?

hnha 13y ago
It's erotica, not pornography. You are using a more controversial "disgusting" term in a low quality comment to denounce the matter.
Eleanor_Erwin 13y ago
my neighbor's sister-in-law makes $81/hr on the laptop. She has been out of a job for 5 months but last month her payment was $19483 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Get the facts..... http://7.ly/6gn http://7.ly/6gn
afhof 13y ago
Its not so much that the image is pornographic, the interesting part is that most computer graphics group is male. If there was a 50/50 male to female split, I doubt this image would have become the de facto test case.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Eh, as a graphics researcher, I'd say it's not a gender issue. Anyone who spends a significant amount of time researching the human visual system in a fair an unbiased way is inexorably pulled to the conclusion that comparing pictures of nude bodies is one of the major tests of whether you're achieving acceptable results, whether you're making a painting or developing a compression algorithm. Humans are hardwired to notice details in naked bodies, possibly moreso than faces (or at least we notice a different set of details than faces). They were onto something important when they chose the Lenna picture, and it's a shame that the original had to be cropped due to technical limitations. And it shouldn't be taboo to use a male model any more than a female one -- both are equally important.
  - skybrian 13y ago
    Do you want to have more female co-workers or not? Working with nude images when you don't really need to is a great way to discourage people from working with you.

jmspring 13y ago

In the 90s, Lena was pretty much one of the images you spent a lot of time looking at if you were in compression research. It was part of a standard set of images we were always comparing agains. I want to say the last time I ran across mention of Lena was either here on HN or through a rant of Charles Bloom -- http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com I do find the story fascinating each time I read it.

NelsonMinar 13y ago

We need a modern Lenna, with a nude man holding a strategically placed Utah teapot.

afhof 13y ago

Why did use Lenna? "Two reason was stated in "A Note on Lena" by David C. Munson. First, the Lenna image contains a nice mixture of detail, flat regions, shading, and texture that do a good job of testing various image processing algorithms. It is a good test image! Second, the Lena image is a picture of an attractive woman. It is not surprising that the (mostly male) image processing research community gravitated toward an image that they found attractive. " http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html

idbfs 13y ago

Two female image processing researchers recently used a picture of Fabio as a test image in a paper of theirs: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6429 http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6429 (Additional discussion at http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/246 http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/246) Personally, I'm all for the use of amusing (arousing?) test images, as long as they exhibit features that actually make for a good test image (a mix of flat and textured regions, sharp boundaries, etc.).

networked 13y ago

The original Lenna image is still copyrighted and will remain so for a while (even if right now Playboy Enterprises, Inc. has decided to not sue people over its use in research) and people can't seem to agree on a standard replacement [1]. Since that is the case, how about a Kickstarter campaign to recreate the 512x512 image as close a possible and distribute the imitation under a free license? I.e., you could hire a professional model (by running a Lenna double contest online?) and a pro photographer, recreate the environment and the props, etc. Keep it clean (no remaking the full nude) and you could get free press and support from the researchers themselves. [1] Though you can find links to a good number of alternative image sets at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_test_image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_test_image.

eCa 13y ago

"Lenna's issue (November 1972) was Playboy's best selling issue ever and sold 7,161,561 copies." "Very few people have seen the complete original picture." Do most people that buy Playboy stop reading before getting to the centerfold?

frozenport 13y ago
if you were born in 1952 you would be over 60.

aaron695 13y ago

Researchers decided to use a picture from a playboy, a magazine that thinks chicks nude are kinda all they are good for (come off it if you seriously think they don't)and we all think it's ok and want to continue it in the comments. Yes, it's history, like rape and pillaging. Yes things of old are cool cause they happened ages ago. But get over it. Nothing against Lenna, cause she was in the industry, but the fact anyone thinks it's cool to bring a playboy into a place of research offends me to the point of boredom.

vr000m 13y ago

So there is at least one scientific paper (image processing) out there which references Playboy (I wonder if Google Scholar has a citation index for this?)

throwaway_068 13y ago

It's perfectly reasonable that image processing and television are optimized for accurate skin tones. But they are optimizing for light skin tones by using test images such as Lenna, the BBC's test image [A], and the BBC's "Flesh Tone Reference Card" [C]. I think this harms image quality for dark skin tones. Television broadcast systems include automatic skin tone correction that "looks for colors in a specific [colorspace] area and any colors within that area are made a color that is closer to the skin tone." There's actually a "correct" skin tone and colors are adjusted to be closer to it. This is implemented in chips [D] for TV signal processing and even at the LCD panel controller level. I've noticed reproduction of dark skin colors is much worse on video conferencing than light skin colors, so this isn't just a theoretical complaint. [A] http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2012/apr/22/the-test-card-girl-and-clown http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2012/apr/2... [B] http://www.videointerchange.com/color_correction1.htm http://www.videointerchange.com/color_correction1.htm [C] http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9780750683951/chapter-9dot-ntsc-and-pal-digital-encoding-and-decoding/432 http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9780750683951/chapter... [D] Examples are the TDA884X PAL/NTSC/SECAM TV processors, SAA7154 video decoder, and the TW8817 LCD controller.