The Interesting Story of Lena.jpg
The image above is one that has been widely used in the image compression studies, even today. This actual photo is dated back to November 1972, and was actually a Playboy magazine centrefold. The same image is also commonly used as a cover/host image in the multimedia (image) security researches; ie. steganography and digital watermarking.
The interesting story of this image was published in the May 2001 article in the Newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society by Jamie Hutchinson. An excerpt from the article as follows:
- Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the USC 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 had 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.
For the complete article, please click here.
Lena.jpg that is used in the researches comes with the size of 512x512 pixels (as in the grayscale image above).
To view the full digitized original image, click here. (Warning: The image contains nudity)
