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What about introducing a new male equivalent image of Lena instead? This approach would at least balance things out while maintaining an image that has become a

What about introducing a new male equivalent image of Lena instead? This approach would at least balance things out while maintaining an image that has become a standard to compare things to for a long time. If I were someone working on image compression techniques I would probably have seen many many algorithms and their output using that image so when I see a new algorithm and a new Lena, I might look at the results and think "Hey, this is similar to this other approach I am familiar with" So many photos taken on any given day are photos of people, so it's simply not practical to eliminate a human subject from test images. If we're going to have an image of a human subject, that person is going to have to be somewhere on the gender spectrum. More data (images of two people) is preferable to no data (no images of people to avoid the risk of offending anyone)

geofft 12y ago
There's a difference between using a picture of a human face because we've determined it's useful for the test at hand, and using a 1970s Playboy scan because that was the most convenient thing for early computer-graphics researchers in the 1970s. In particular, the (appropriately-licensed) Kodak image set used in the Mozilla study includes multiple pictures of women, none of which are Playboy scans. The complaint is not that there's a picture of a woman, it is that _this_ particular picture keeps being used despite no particular scientific reason why it's optimal for comparing graphics formats. http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/ http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/
- malandrew 12y ago
  So the only real contention people have here is the source publication of the original image, right? Because AFAICT, the cropped image (as it's always been used in practice) is nor more or less offensive that kodim04.png from the kodak set. Furthermore, why does the licensing matter? Near as I can tell every use of Lena, except for by a for-profit company, constitutes fair use. The image, every time I've seen it, has been used for non-profit educational work. It's never reproduced in its entirety. The use of the image for this image compression purposes has no impact on the original market for which the image was originally created. Does this not meet the requirements of fair use? That all said, I agree that if their is a better images available for this purposes, those should be used as well, but that is an entirely separate issue from whether or not Lena should or should not be used. The happenstance provenance of the image is really the only controversial detail, and if we go back to the history of why it was used it was mere chance: Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California 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 got 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.[0] Put yourself back in 1973. Imagine all the different sources of high quality glossy images of a human face with high dynamic range you might have easy access to 41 years ago. I have a hard time thinking of content that would have been available at that time that would have rivaled Playboy. I have no qualms with people judging things from today in todays terms, but presentism [1] tends to rub me the wrong way. If you want to judge something, don't do so anachronistically. Anyways, I want to re-iterate my main point, which you did not address: If I were someone working on image compression techniques I would probably have seen many many algorithms and their output using that image so when I see a new algorithm and a new Lena, I might look at the results and think "Hey, this is similar to this other approach I am familiar with" There is value in consistency/continuity. Starting to use the image of Fabio Lanzoni like Deanna Needell and Rachel Ward did is a "lossless" approach of dealing with the controversial provenance of Lena. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#History [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_%28literary_and_historical_analysis%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_%28literary_and_hist...
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    I find the argument that there would be a lack of high-quality images in 1973 utterly unconvincing. Life magazine or national geographic could have been used. It was just a historical accident, and contrary to what you claim, I do not believe there is a pressing reason to keep using the exact same image, it's merely a relatively unquestioned tradition.
    - malandrew 12y ago
      Almost none of the images from life magazine are studio images. The quality of the images vary greatly depending on the equipment used by the photo-journalist (often viewfinder Leicas not large format Hasselblads). National Geographic has been printed in a format that is approximately have the surface area as Playboy. From a cursory search of NG covers from 1973, the images aren't the same quality as those achievable with studio photography equipment available at the time. > It was just a historical accident, and contrary to what you claim, I do not believe there is a pressing reason to keep using the exact same image, it's merely a relatively unquestioned tradition. Many people (including myself) do not believe there is a pressing reason to not keep using the exact same image. I do think there is good reason to publish research with additional test images including the Kodak set linked to above. "Dilution" of the image would achieve the same goal some are advocating here. Lastly, I find the following heuristic valuable: function hasValidOpinion(person) { return person.hasPublishedContentInField(); } Near as I can tell from the profiles of people participating in this bikeshed, that function produces false for you, geofft, loudmax and myself. The truth is that none of our opinions are relevant here since this isn't our bikeshed to paint. The easiest way to break from this tradition is to produce novel research in the area of image compression and publish papers without using this image as a reference. Feel free to publish a paper without it if this matters so much. In the meantime, it's not really fair to be out there criticizing those who are from the comfort of your armchair.
      - andreasvc 12y ago
        I'm not convinced that other magazines couldn't have provided an image of similar quality, your arguments are rather hand-wavy. The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority. I don't care to convince you that we should change the practice of using this picture, but I'm curious to know why you would think we should NOT change it, given that there happen to be people who believe that we should.
hokkos 12y ago
>A 2012 paper on compressed sensing by Deanna Needell and Rachel Ward used a photo of the model Fabio Lanzoni as a test image to draw attention to this issue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Controversy
- chillingeffect 12y ago
  Well, now that they have done it, straight males can "try on" what the oppression of Lena must feel like for women: So everyone, please respond: Now that there's an "attractive" man in use for image testing, do you feel repulsed or discouraged that they would sexualize/objectify a man like that? Do you feel pushed away from this industry? Personally, this exercise is helping me see the light of the "are we treating women as delicate flowers who can't handle it" viewpoint. That image of Fabio is not threatening to me. Anyone who tries to tell me it is threaten, I think is being overly sensitive. I'm utterly comfortable with people expressing this level of sexuality in the academic/public area. It's more akin to a "schoolkid crush" than to strip tease.
vernie 12y ago
I think we should also retire the mandrill image since it strikes me as speciesist.

geofft 12y ago

There's a difference between using a picture of a human face because we've determined it's useful for the test at hand, and using a 1970s Playboy scan because that was the most convenient thing for early computer-graphics researchers in the 1970s. In particular, the (appropriately-licensed) Kodak image set used in the Mozilla study includes multiple pictures of women, none of which are Playboy scans. The complaint is not that there's a picture of a woman, it is that _this_ particular picture keeps being used despite no particular scientific reason why it's optimal for comparing graphics formats. http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/ http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/

malandrew 12y ago
So the only real contention people have here is the source publication of the original image, right? Because AFAICT, the cropped image (as it's always been used in practice) is nor more or less offensive that kodim04.png from the kodak set. Furthermore, why does the licensing matter? Near as I can tell every use of Lena, except for by a for-profit company, constitutes fair use. The image, every time I've seen it, has been used for non-profit educational work. It's never reproduced in its entirety. The use of the image for this image compression purposes has no impact on the original market for which the image was originally created. Does this not meet the requirements of fair use? That all said, I agree that if their is a better images available for this purposes, those should be used as well, but that is an entirely separate issue from whether or not Lena should or should not be used. The happenstance provenance of the image is really the only controversial detail, and if we go back to the history of why it was used it was mere chance: Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California 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 got 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.[0] Put yourself back in 1973. Imagine all the different sources of high quality glossy images of a human face with high dynamic range you might have easy access to 41 years ago. I have a hard time thinking of content that would have been available at that time that would have rivaled Playboy. I have no qualms with people judging things from today in todays terms, but presentism [1] tends to rub me the wrong way. If you want to judge something, don't do so anachronistically. Anyways, I want to re-iterate my main point, which you did not address: If I were someone working on image compression techniques I would probably have seen many many algorithms and their output using that image so when I see a new algorithm and a new Lena, I might look at the results and think "Hey, this is similar to this other approach I am familiar with" There is value in consistency/continuity. Starting to use the image of Fabio Lanzoni like Deanna Needell and Rachel Ward did is a "lossless" approach of dealing with the controversial provenance of Lena. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#History [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_%28literary_and_historical_analysis%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_%28literary_and_hist...
- andreasvc 12y ago
  I find the argument that there would be a lack of high-quality images in 1973 utterly unconvincing. Life magazine or national geographic could have been used. It was just a historical accident, and contrary to what you claim, I do not believe there is a pressing reason to keep using the exact same image, it's merely a relatively unquestioned tradition.
  - malandrew 12y ago
    Almost none of the images from life magazine are studio images. The quality of the images vary greatly depending on the equipment used by the photo-journalist (often viewfinder Leicas not large format Hasselblads). National Geographic has been printed in a format that is approximately have the surface area as Playboy. From a cursory search of NG covers from 1973, the images aren't the same quality as those achievable with studio photography equipment available at the time. > It was just a historical accident, and contrary to what you claim, I do not believe there is a pressing reason to keep using the exact same image, it's merely a relatively unquestioned tradition. Many people (including myself) do not believe there is a pressing reason to not keep using the exact same image. I do think there is good reason to publish research with additional test images including the Kodak set linked to above. "Dilution" of the image would achieve the same goal some are advocating here. Lastly, I find the following heuristic valuable: function hasValidOpinion(person) { return person.hasPublishedContentInField(); } Near as I can tell from the profiles of people participating in this bikeshed, that function produces false for you, geofft, loudmax and myself. The truth is that none of our opinions are relevant here since this isn't our bikeshed to paint. The easiest way to break from this tradition is to produce novel research in the area of image compression and publish papers without using this image as a reference. Feel free to publish a paper without it if this matters so much. In the meantime, it's not really fair to be out there criticizing those who are from the comfort of your armchair.
    - andreasvc 12y ago
      I'm not convinced that other magazines couldn't have provided an image of similar quality, your arguments are rather hand-wavy. The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority. I don't care to convince you that we should change the practice of using this picture, but I'm curious to know why you would think we should NOT change it, given that there happen to be people who believe that we should.

hokkos 12y ago

>A 2012 paper on compressed sensing by Deanna Needell and Rachel Ward used a photo of the model Fabio Lanzoni as a test image to draw attention to this issue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Controversy

chillingeffect 12y ago
Well, now that they have done it, straight males can "try on" what the oppression of Lena must feel like for women: So everyone, please respond: Now that there's an "attractive" man in use for image testing, do you feel repulsed or discouraged that they would sexualize/objectify a man like that? Do you feel pushed away from this industry? Personally, this exercise is helping me see the light of the "are we treating women as delicate flowers who can't handle it" viewpoint. That image of Fabio is not threatening to me. Anyone who tries to tell me it is threaten, I think is being overly sensitive. I'm utterly comfortable with people expressing this level of sexuality in the academic/public area. It's more akin to a "schoolkid crush" than to strip tease.

vernie 12y ago

I think we should also retire the mandrill image since it strikes me as speciesist.