这女人是谁？

有人认识这女人是谁吗？

我想读过 Image Processing 的学生都应该不陌生

对了！！
她就是常常出现在不同的书本里
每个 Image Processing method 就会拿她的尊容来做分析的俏丽女郎

而我也很好奇
她究竟是谁？
经过我Google 了一下，发觉她还蛮出名的

她的真名叫 Lena Söderberg , 瑞典模特儿，　
而这张照片，就是在1972 年11 月为PlayBoy 杂志拍的其中一张

而她的粉刺还特地为她作了首诗呢

Sonnet for Lena
O dear Lena, your beauty is so vast
It is hard sometimes to describe it fast.
I thought the entire world I would impress
If only your portrait I could compress.
Alas! First when I tried to use VQ
I found that your cheeks belong to only you.
Your silky hair contains a thousand lines
Hard to match with sums of discrete cosines.
And for your lips, sensual and tactual
Thirteen Crays found not the proper fractal.
And while these setbacks are all quite severe
I might have fixed them with hacks here or there
But when filters took sparkle from your eyes
I said, “Fuck this shit. I’ll just digitize.

by Thomas C

而现在的我更好奇了
为什么她这张照片会被选为Image Processing 主要的分析照片呢？
我又Google　了一下发现
这张照片背后原来有个好笑的故事

下面这整段故事我就不翻译了

Jamie Hutchinson in an article in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE professional Communications Society writes about the pictures history.

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.

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 × 512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject’s shoulders.

A more amazingly amusing account that even discusses the debate regarding the picture can be found on the page of DAVID C. MUNSON, JR. of the CMU here.

An excerpt from his writing.

I think it is safe to assume that the Lena image became a standard in our “industry” for two reasons. First, the 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. The Woody Allen buffs among you may be interested to know that the Lena image appeared in the movie Sleeper. Tom Huang pointed this out to me. In the scene where Allen awakes in the year 2173, he is asked to identify a number of artifacts from the past, including photographs of Joseph Stalin and Charles de Gaulle, and the issue of Playboy Magazine containing Lena.

and regarding the debate he writes:

Well, quite understandably, some members of our community are unhappy with the source of the Lena image. I am sympathetic to their argument, which states that we should not use material from any publication that is seen (by some) as being degrading to women. I must tell you, though, that within any single segment of our community (e.g., men, women, feminists), there is a complete diversity of opinion on the Lena issue. You may be surprised to know that most persons who have approached me on this issue are male. On the other hand, some informal polling on my part suggests that most males are not even aware of the origin of the Lena image! I have heard feminists argue that the image should be retired. However, I just recently corresponded with a feminist who had a different point of view. She was familiar with the Lena image, but she had not imagined that there could be any controversy. When I offered an explanation of why some persons are offended by the use of the image. she responded tartly. A watered-down version of her reply is, “There isn’t much of Lena showing in the Lena image. This political correctness stuff infuriates me!”