Lenna or Lena is the name given to a standard test image widely used in the field of image processing since 1973. It is a picture of the Swedish model Lena Forsén, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker, cropped from the centerfold of the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. The spelling "Lenna" came from the model's desire to encourage the proper pronunciation of her name. "I didn't want to be called Leena ," she explained.
History
Before Lenna, the first use of a Playboy magazine image to illustrate image processing algorithms was in 1961. Lawrence G. Roberts used two cropped 6-bit grayscale facsimile scanned images from Playboy's July 1960 issue featuring PlaymateTeddi Smith, in his MITmaster's thesis on image dithering. Intended for high resolution color image processing study, the Lenna picture's history was described in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, in an article by Jamie Hutchinson: This scan became one of the most used images in computer history. In a 1999 issue of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing "Lena" was used in three separate articles, and the picture continued to appear in scientific journals throughout the beginning of the 21st century. Lenna is so widely accepted in the image processing community that Forsén was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997. The use of the photo in electronic imaging has been described as "clearly one of the most important events in history". In 2015, Lena Forsén was also guest of honor at the banquet of IEEE ICIP 2015. After delivering a speech, she chaired the best paper award ceremony. To explain Lenna's popularity, David C. Munson, editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, noted that it was a good test image because of its detail, flat regions, shading, and texture. However, he also noted that its popularity was largely because an image of an attractive woman appealed to the males in a male-dominated field. While Playboy often cracks down on illegal uses of its material and did initially send out notices to research publications and journals that used the image, over time it has decided to overlook the wide use of Lena. Eileen Kent, VP of new media at Playboy, said, "We decided we should exploit this, because it is a phenomenon."
Criticism
The use of the image has produced controversy because Playboy is "seen as being degrading to women", and the Lenna photo has been pointed to as an example of sexism in the sciences, reinforcing gender stereotypes. In a 1999 essay on reasons for the male predominance in computer science, applied mathematician Dianne P. O'Leary wrote: A 2012 paper on compressed sensing used a photo of the model Fabio Lanzoni as a test image to draw attention to this issue. The use of the test image at the magnet schoolThomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia provoked a guest editorial by a senior in The Washington Post in 2015 about its detrimental impact on aspiring female students in computer science. In 2017, the Journal of Modern Optics published an editorial titled "On alternatives to Lenna" suggesting three images that "are reasonably close to Lenna in feature space". In 2018, the Nature Research family of journals announced that they would no longer consider articles using the Lenna image. On 31 October 2018, the used an image of female computer science pioneer and US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper as a test image. On 19 November 2019, Code Like a Girl released a film and campaign called Losing Lena, with the aim of eliminating use of the Lena image in order to encourage more female participation in computing.
Remastering
, Jeff Seideman, of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, was working with the archivist of Playboy to rescan the image from the original negatives.
