I could have put this under BookBoon - free ebooks and textbooks, but it's too funny to hide from you avid Orly watchers....

I downloaded one of the free books there, "Digital Image Processing - Part I" -- partly because it is an area of expertise for me, and I could evaluate the free book service; partly to try to answer Piffle's questions about pdf's on kindle; and partly thinking the book contents might inform some of our LFBC discussions.

Lo and behold, I find the following page 29:



The caption starts:



Now I knew I had seen this image many times before in other digital textbooks. But I never knew it had a name. Wikipedia explains:





So -- meet Lenorly! 40 year old Playmate, iconic benchmark of image manipulators and birth certificate forgerers, and mascot of radio call-in impersonators!

By the looks of things, the decade or so since she was 40 was not kind to her.

The real Lenna looks pretty damn good to me.

A Lena thread, yay!

Well hell yeah. You don't happen to have her email or Facebook address, do you?

I think Lila = Lena = Orly. (Possible the radio screener heard "Lila" wrong?)

I lourves The Spoonful! This one must have been a Side B recording.

I used to use that image all the time when I did research in data compression - at least at the time (early 90's) it was used as a common base of comparison for different algorithms. I even have the full scan ... you know... not cut off at the shoulders... on a computer here somewhere (now I'm going to have to look).

Who owns the copyright. The holder must be as rich as the copyright holder of "Happy Birthday to You."

For the curious on the full sise version you can see a thumbnail sise of it at http://members.i.playboy.com/Playboy-Ma ... ue/138-140

I got the link off the wikipedia page above.

Playboy owns the copyright. At one point they were thinking about enforcing it and then decided not to. Been a while since I read the wikipedia page, but I think it's discussed there (along with more about how that image started getting used).

It's great for comparing different compression algorithms: there are lots of small scale and large scale effects, so it really challenges algorithms.

I actually showed this picture to an undergraduate student of mine to describe an application for some linear algebra things we were doing. Had to be careful to make sure it was just the cutoff version that was on the webpage before I could show it.

Is Chito Papa aware of this?

She's a pretty lady, but there are lots of pretty ladies. Is there anything ELSE about that graphic that made it be the standard for comparing different compression algorithms whatever the heck that means? Is it like one of those sentences with all the letters of the alphabet or sumptin'?

BTW are you already planning your short side trip to Kenya to mosaick the True Obama KFCB? Larry and others may want to know ...

There's nothing particularly special about it other than some people started using it and publishing results with it, and so others used it so they could compare apples-to-apples with previous algorithms, and then others used it, ... Sometimes things happen, for no reason that's really planned out.

That said, if the image had been a really boring example it wouldn't have had the staying power that it did. Switching pretty quickly from smooth gradients on skin (Playboy airbrushing maybe?) to fine detail on the feather in the hat could bring out artifacts in algorithms that wouldn't have shown up in more uniform images.

Attention birthers:



Thank you Dr. Blue. for my dose of hella-yeah this morning.

Sometimes I think the world is divided between people who respond to new things with a "Golly! Whoever woulda thunk it!" and those who respond with "I knew that was gunna come out all along."

The latter set learn to avoid truly new things, and small subset degenerate into birtherism and other CTs, where they can invent whatever they want to know, and then just choose to look at the world that way.

Lol... back in the day, the signal processing people had that picture plastered all over their labs. I was doing solid state device research, and I couldn't for the life of me understand their fixation with that image.

No, there's nothing particularly "special" about it. It simply was used for a few digital image processing studies, and then became something of a reference standard, like the "Indian head" television calibration signal:



People's brains are wired to recognize familiar faces, so the effects of various compression and other image manipulation algorithms could be immediately seen since everyone, and I mean everyone, in the signal processing field knows the Lena image as if she was a family member.

Memo to self: Must read "The Fogbow" less! My subconscious has started to work on Orly!
(Did you know that Sigmund Freud's birthplace is only 500 miles away from Orly's?)
Anyway, when I woke up this morning, I came up with two perfectly reasonable explanations for the "Lena" story.

Number one:
Orly is Swedish! I had wondered about her hair, but the explanation must be that she has a Swedish ancestor. And that is extremely likely: The Swedish king Charles XII was defeated by the Russians and had to set up camp in Bender in what now is Moldova, from 1709-1713, together with around 1000 Swedish officers and men. So one of those dashing young Swedes met with Orly's great-great-....-great grandmother and things happened! This was passed on in the family, of course, so when Orly looked for a name which she could use she came up with Len(n)a!

Number two:
This is Freud again. You know how he used Greek mythology a lot to explain things? Well, Orly probably subconsciously thought of the famous story of Lena and the Rooster! Zeus fell in love with Lena, see, and he changed himself into a rooster to visit her! You probably all know the pictures, here is one suitable for a family forum like this one. It is a tiny bit flattering of the rooster, of course.

[imgwidth=]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Leonardo_da_Vinci_-_Study_for_a_kneeling_Leda_-_WGA12756.jpg[/imgwidth]

Chicken Little meets Ugly Duckling