To:
EE 1001 Class
From: Stan Burns
10 December 2015
Re:
Background on “Lenna” as excerpted from Anil K Kandangath and from
several IEEE and IS&T sources
Anyone familiar with digital image processing will surely recognize the image of Lena.
While going through some old usenet discussions, I got to know that Lena has a history
worth all the attention that has been paid to her over the years by countless image
processing researchers.
Lena Sjööblom, (also spelled Lenna by many publications) was the Playboy playmate in
November 1972 and rose to fame in the computer world when researchers at the
University of Southern California scanned and digitized her image in June 1973. (Lena
herself never know of her fame until she was interviewed by a computer magazine in
Sweden where she lives with her husband and children).
According to the IEEE PCS Newsletter of May/June 2001, they were hurriedly searching
for a glossy image which they could scan and use for a conference paper when someone
walked in with a copy of Playboy. The engineers tore off the top third of the centerfold
and scanned it with a Muirhead wire photo scanner (a distant cry from the flatbed
scanners of today) by wrapping it around the drum of the scanner. (Now you know why
the image shows only a small part of the entire picture.. discounting of course, the fact
that the complete picture would raise quite a few eyebrows. ……
At a maximum possible resolution of 100 lines
per inch of their scanner, the researchers were
able to scan only the top 5.12 inches of the image
(to obtain a 512 x 512 pixel image) and the
complicated scanning process also lost one line
from the image. (The top line was replicated to
obtain 512 rows) since the image was needed in a
hurry. This distorted (the imperfect A/D
converters also ensured that the image was
slightly elongated) image soon became a standard
when USC researchers began handing out the
Lena image to test compression and encoding
algorithms.
Over the years, the Lena image has been used so much that she is now dubbed the First
Lady of the Internet! The Lena image is now considered the benchmark for testing and
demonstration of image compression and
transmission algorithms. ……the image is now
widely accepted as one that satisfied many of
the requirements of a standard "test" image for
image processing. The January 1996 IEEE
Transactions on Image Processing has a note
from the Editor-in-chief who says that "image
contains a nice mixture of detail, flat regions,
shading, and texture that do a good job of
testing various image processing algorithms".
Over the years, the image has attracted its fair
share of controversy (from people who have
demanded that the image be dropped from
research and IEEE publications due to it's
'ignominious' origins) …. Playboy magazine
which seems to have decided not to enforce it's copyright privileges over the image…..
More from additional sources:
 Who create the "Lenna" image?
I worked for 5 years ('78 - '83) at the Image Processing Institute as a system programmer
in the Image Processing Lab (IPL) which distributed Lenna and several other images
(including the Mandril) which people often refer to as "The baboon image." The
"unknown researcher" was Dr. William K. Pratt, now of Sun Microsystems, who was
writing a book on image processing and he needed some standard images for it. For a
long time the folded up centerfold that had been the basis for that image was in the file
cabinet at the lab. I went back in 1997 to visit and the lab has undergone many changes
and the original image files were nowhere to be found. The original distribution format
was 1600BPI 9-track tape with each color plane stored separately.
--Chuck McManis (USC Class of '83)
 Yes, it's true! Lenna attended the 50th Anniversary IS&T
http://www.imaging.org/ conference in Boston held in May 1997.
According to all reports, the event went spectacularly. Everyone was excited to finally
meet Lenna in person and get her autograph. And she got a chance to meet some of the
many people who have been using her picture as the basis of their research.
Here is a picture of Lenna Soderberg (Sjööblom) and Jeff Seideman taken in May 1997 at
IS&T's 50th Anniversary conference:
In his role as president of the Boston chapter of the IS&T, arranged for Lenna to attend
the conference. He is also president of ImageTech Communications, the nation's only
public relations firm focusing exclusively on imaging.
Here is a picture of Lenna (with Dr.
James Owens of Eastman Kodak)
examining posters which describe
research which used her picture:
Here is the picture of Lenna from page
of the September 1997 issue of Playboy
Magazine:
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