The 'Lenna' Story

The above picture needs no introduction for people who at some point of time in their life have come across Image Compression. Yes, the famous 'Lenna' image! Ever wondered to know the story behind this image? Read on !

The lady in the picture is Lena Soderberg. The picture's history was described in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, in an article by Jamie Hutchinson:-

“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.”

If you want to see the ORIGINAL Lenna image that appeared on the Playboy magazine - Click Here. WARNING this picture contains nudity.

David C. Munson, editor-in-chief, January 1996 IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, cited two reasons for the popularity of the image in research:-

“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."

Lenna attended the 50th Anniversary IS&T conference in Boston held in May 1997.