Image compression icon, 47 years on
February 1, 2019 12:49 PM   Subscribe

Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs (Wired) - Linda Kinstler "Jeff Seideman, a former chapter president of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, recalls that Lena’s presence at the conference caused a stir among his colleagues. “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me. “After some of them had spent 25 years looking at her picture, she just became this test image.” Since then, as the internet has grown to encompass billions of users and trillions of photos, no one has bothered to ask her what she makes of her image and its controversial afterlife."

“She did that work, and then people started using the photo in this neat new way, and now she kind of has this immortality woven into the design of the machine,” Hicks said. “That’s why others, who are concerned about tech bias, have a problem with it. It’s intentionally designing systems around a particular set of power relationships.” Previously
posted by CrystalDave (33 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
I knew about Lena - she was in my Digital Signal Processing textbook. And Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner is prominent in the MP3 story. But Suzanne Vega didn't know that her song helped define the MP3 standard? And then, in a group with L’Inconnue de la Seine and Audrey Munson and Susan Bennett and Shirley Page - that's more than a suspicious trend.
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:22 PM on February 1, 2019 [7 favorites]


I only look at her for the pixels.
posted by chavenet at 1:50 PM on February 1, 2019 [5 favorites]


What I found most interesting was that her work as a Kodak "Shirley" was surprisingly similar in nature to what her centerfold photo was used for in the world of digital imaging.
posted by asnider at 1:54 PM on February 1, 2019 [4 favorites]


Whenever I see beautiful models in '70s and '80s shots, I wonder where they are now, how invisibly they might be passing by me on the city streets, wearing bobble hats, walking little dogs, pushing grocery carts. Lena is not the person in the picture, nor does she seem to want to be. She is what a centerfold was never supposed to be and always was: a real person.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:05 PM on February 1, 2019 [5 favorites]


I remember being really confused about why an HP Scanjet came with a continuous tone photographic reference print with this specific image and some color/tone/resolution targets, until I heard more and more of the story as time went on.

Whenever I see beautiful models in '70s and '80s shots, I wonder where they are now, how invisibly they might be passing by me on the city streets, wearing bobble hats, walking little dogs, pushing grocery carts.

I've met people like this and so far they've all been a hoot and a lot of fun.

One of the benefits - and drawbacks - of living in my weird little retiree hippy town is getting to meet people like this, hearing their stories and seeing them just going about town living their lives. I have a small posse of totally rad older women in town that I like to hang out with, and will almost always drop whatever I'm doing to go drink box wine on a beach in the summer or go smoke a joint or something.

The drawbacks to this is that, well, they're old. We just lost another vibrant person who was well known and loved by many, which is three people I knew passing in as many years. Part of her impromptu memorial at a music/art space was some paintings she'd either modeled for or painted herself.
posted by loquacious at 2:35 PM on February 1, 2019 [10 favorites]


I've worked in image compression off and on over the years, and I for one would be happy to never see another Lena. I'm amazed when I see new research that uses her image. “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person” sums up so much.
posted by (parenthetic me) at 2:38 PM on February 1, 2019 [15 favorites]


I agree that the use of a Playboy photo, regardless of the original intention, contributed a lot to the toxic masculinity problem in computer science.

I think that, for all technical purposes from now on, they should replace the 1973 Lenna image with the photo of the 67-year-old Lena reprising the pose. It’d preserve the reference to her role in history, neutralise the male-gazey objectification inherent in the original image, and additionally probably work much better for the photo’s stated purpose, testing image-processing algorithms, having more fine detail. (Accurately compressing a gauzy photo of a fresh-faced 21-year-old would be a lot less challenging than accurately compressing a photo of an older person, wrinkles, grey hairs and all, for example.)
posted by acb at 3:26 PM on February 1, 2019 [26 favorites]


Dons armour (specular shading). Embarks on a quest to seek the most holy Teapot of Utah!
posted by Dub at 4:14 PM on February 1, 2019 [4 favorites]


Strange that her eyes are brown in the original photo.
posted by hypersloth at 4:18 PM on February 1, 2019


more fine detail

The Lena image does have fine detail. The photo has endured because it really is a pretty good test for image compression.
posted by ryanrs at 4:23 PM on February 1, 2019


The photo has endured because engineers can’t see the social problems inherent in using a pornographic image as the baseline for a standard, and they have the gall to wonder why the field is regarded as hostile to women.

There are very few good reasons for a sexually suggestive photo of a woman to be used in this context. Even having the damn magazine in the office would be considered harassing behaviour now, and for good reason.
posted by prismatic7 at 4:57 PM on February 1, 2019 [17 favorites]


A bare shoulder hardly counts as pornographic.
posted by ryanrs at 5:00 PM on February 1, 2019 [4 favorites]


Maybe not, but that hat is pretty randy.
posted by dr_dank at 5:08 PM on February 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


Maybe not, but Playboy is definitely a soft porn mag.
posted by prismatic7 at 5:41 PM on February 1, 2019 [1 favorite]


As someone who is trans and knows at least a little bit about how either side of the gender spectrum and existence feels, I'm on the side of the fence that the image is definitely chosen to be male gaze eye candy of an attractive woman and not specifically for it's image compression training qualities. Somewhere someone made a choice because they were attracted to Lena and/or the image presented.

While skin tones are a known problem and issue with image compression - search for "waxy jpeg skin tone" for a start on the subject - the same color dynamics and gamut could have been represented by a nice landscape or nature shot with a good broad-color histogram, or some other human subject. Why not a very elderly person's deeply wrinkled and knurled hands holding a wide variety of colorful flowers and fractal-spiraling ferns in a macro focused mode with a whole lot of bokey and background blur for a difficult mode compression test?

And with respects today or any time after the invention of jpeg/mpeg compression schemes, why not an image compression-specific target image of swatches of abstract tones, textures and patterns designed to challenge image compression algorithms the same way test cards were once designed to calibrate film still and motion cameras, video cameras and other visual media processes?

Why a romanticized or overtly erotic Playboy image? If you think about it from the right angle and extrapolate enough, it's like someone chose that G-rated yet erotic image because they were already thinking about the applications of the image technology specifically in terms of erotica and porn.

Which, you know, isn't really that far outside of scope for the known history of media and technology adoption and driving forces. It'd be really interesting to see some graphs about how many bytes or licenses or use cases for image/media compression tech are broken down into porn vs. non-porn use rates and total byte rates.

I also still want Lena's hat and maybe her whole outfit.
posted by loquacious at 5:43 PM on February 1, 2019 [10 favorites]


and maybe her whole outfit

I... I can’t tell if this is a joke or not
posted by olinerd at 5:52 PM on February 1, 2019 [2 favorites]


Why a romanticized or overtly erotic Playboy image?

Yes, the first guy picked that image because he had a playboy magazine readily available and also probably because he thought she looked hot.

Everybody else since then has been using it so they can compare their compressed output to the large body of existing work that also uses that image. Standardized input data is useful when you have many groups of researchers working independently.

Most of my work has been in video compression, not still images, so I've never used the Lena image. In my work, we used videos of the telephone hair-toss woman, mother daughter, and the goofy construction guy.

why not an image compression-specific target image of swatches of abstract tones, textures and patterns designed to challenge image compression algorithms

Because image compressors aren't used to compress abstract designs, they're mostly used to compress real images. So if you want to measure real world performance, you need to use real world data.
posted by ryanrs at 6:00 PM on February 1, 2019 [9 favorites]


Where is mandrill?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:16 PM on February 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


1) How did she find an almost identical hat?
2) Did she keep the original? No, it is slightly different.
3) That hat is commercially available because it is the hat she wore in The Lenna.
4) Whoa, dude!
posted by Meatbomb at 6:20 PM on February 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


Metafilter: I’m just surprised that it never ends
posted by gwint at 7:23 PM on February 1, 2019


I'm partial to NewTek: Maxine Headroom. If I recollect properly, she at least worked for NewTek and was not pulled from a magazine as it were.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:07 PM on February 1, 2019 [1 favorite]


On the one hand, it legitimately is a good image for testing compression and denoising algorithms. On the other hand there are many such images! Scipy (hugely popular, essentially standard, Python library for scientific computing) has replaced it with a picture of a raccoon among some palm fronds that works fine.

It would be good to live in a world where the actual Lena’s rather continental attitude is the right one and this image is not a problem. People grow attached to traditions; this is one of the few things that’s stayed the same in these fields over 40+ years.

But it clearly does contribute in small and large ways to making computing and engineering feel exclusively male. I think we would be better off without it.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:00 PM on February 1, 2019 [1 favorite]


And for people not in the field, I should mention that modern test sequences aren't pulled from porno mags like in the cowboy computer science days of the 1970s. These days we have international standards organizations to produce test inputs. For example, the ITU publishes a lot of test data for video and audio compression.
posted by ryanrs at 9:39 PM on February 1, 2019


Ah ha! I found one: foreman.avi

That's a modern(ish) ITU test video. I probably watched that video 20 times a day when doing codec work in the 1990s. The quality looks shitty because the source material was probably 704x576, plus youtube's algorithm doesn't appear to be doing it any favors.

(Don't turn your sound up, there is none. The audio compression people are in a different department.)

See also: son of foreman.avi
posted by ryanrs at 9:50 PM on February 1, 2019 [2 favorites]


A bare shoulder hardly counts as pornographic.

But those in the know are aware of the provenance of the image, and its context. Saying that it's OK because the Lenna image as used in the lab is not pornographic in itself is some Sugarape-grade trolling, sort of like Nazis using numbers to stand in for slogans, or “I didn't call that gay, I called it “ghey”, you're the homophobe for thinking it's homophobic”.

Context counts. A picture everybody knows is a porno centrefold is a raised flag of frat-house masculinity, as much as the number 88 is a flag of white supremacism.
posted by acb at 3:40 AM on February 2, 2019 [8 favorites]


Everybody else since then has been using it so they can compare their compressed output to the large body of existing work that also uses that image.

Pretty sure that there are social and not technical/scientific reasons why this image accrued a large body of existing work instead of an image of two dudes happily kissing.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:48 AM on February 2, 2019 [2 favorites]


Ah ha! I found one: foreman.avi

Oh man, I forgot all about Foreman! I spent many hours watching him as well, but not as many as Apple's quicktime A/V sync test. These things will drive you mad. PEEP....BEEP....PEEP....
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:03 AM on February 2, 2019


Perhaps consider that your opinion of whether the image is harmful to women in tech does not matter one fucking bit if you are a man in tech. I don’t care that you, a man, aren’t bothered by the image. Let me know how you feel when you’re part of the marginalized group that’s routinely under-hired, underpaid, and harassed out of the industry and your opinion on how we’ve historically used women as props to be gazed upon will matter.

It’s just a bare shoulder? Are you kidding me? That’s willfully ignorant of the context.
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 12:16 PM on February 2, 2019 [11 favorites]


Perhaps consider that your opinion of whether the image is harmful to women in tech does not matter one fucking bit if you are a man in tech. I don’t care that you, a man, aren’t bothered by the image. Let me know how you feel when you’re part of the marginalized group that’s routinely under-hired, underpaid, and harassed out of the industry and your opinion on how we’ve historically used women as props to be gazed upon will matter.

It’s just a bare shoulder? Are you kidding me? That’s willfully ignorant of the context.


QFT. Don't suggest to people that they are overreacting.

When I got my first tech-adjacent scientific research job (not directly in computer science but heavily computational) I learned when I got my account on the group Unix cluster that the admin of the cluster had set the default background image on the desktop to a naked woman.

I followed what I had just learned in new employee training and reported this to the harassment office.

My supervisors were very upset, hopping mad - at me, for "getting them in trouble" with the harassment office. I was sternly chided and almost fired.

The admin experienced no consequences that I am aware of.

If you think this is not a big deal you should suck my dickthink again.
posted by medusa at 2:31 PM on February 2, 2019 [4 favorites]


I understand the urge programmers (especially the aspie types) have to use a test image that has been around forever. There is value in having that baseline. However, it does more harm than good at this point for the reasons well discussed previously.

Furthermore, there are other, less problematic, images that could be used for that purpose. The Lena may have been first, but it is by no means the only test image that has been in common use since at least the 80s. I have particularly vivid memories of coming across the one with a woman of color and a fruit basket many times in the early days of digital imaging. (I think it was originally from one of Kodak's film tests and it got scanned sometime in the 80s)

If there was an actual tradeoff here, there would be room for reasonable people to debate whether or not the technical benefits outweighed the social harms, but there isn't actually anything being lost by simply not using the Lena going forward. When people tell you something hurts and your only reason for continuing to do that thing is tradition or because change makes you uncomfortable you're being an asshole by continuing to do the thing or even making the argument that the thing should still be accepted.
posted by wierdo at 7:10 PM on February 2, 2019


And with respects today or any time after the invention of jpeg/mpeg compression schemes, why not an image compression-specific target image of swatches of abstract tones, textures and patterns designed to challenge image compression algorithms the same way test cards were once designed to calibrate film still and motion cameras, video cameras and other visual media processes?

As a Brit of a certain age, this reminded me of Test Card F - and specifically to Carol Hersee - the - at the time - 8 year old daughter of a TV engineer who has become the woman who has been on TV more than anybody else living or dead - upwards of 70K hours. (See this video about her). Unlike the Lena image, everything about the test card was designed specifically to be a test of transmission and display quality. Test card F also had matching music commissioned to accompany its display - which was a test as well as an entertainment.

Let us not speak of her clown
posted by rongorongo at 10:31 PM on February 2, 2019 [2 favorites]


The straight male engineers who chose (and continue to choose) this image aren't socially inept. They know that if they used the full pornographic photo, it would be seen as unprofessional. So they crop enough to get crap past the radar, knowing that they'll always have the "but it has good properties for a test image" or "but its been used in all the other tests" or "but you're just being too sensitive" excuses at ready. This is, of course, disingenuous horseshit in the same way a 6 year old's "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you" is disingenuous horseshit.

It's not the god damn value of pi. This image was chosen, and it was chosen because it is male gaze bullshit. They know they'll be given the benefit of the doubt. Getting into a fight over whether this is an appropriate image doesn't advanced the field of computer graphics, but it's a fight they want to have nonetheless because they know it's a fight they'll win (or, at least, won't cost them any professional credibility even in the rare case where they lose). The straight male engineers who chose (and continue to choose) this carefully cropped, only-technically-not-porn image aren't clueless or socially awkward:

They're demonstrating emotional intelligence.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:21 PM on February 3, 2019 [4 favorites]


I'm not saying the people who originally used the image and perpetuated it to this point are socially inept, I'm saying it's an easy argument for a socially inept person to make if they haven't fully considered the issue.

There's a reason my comment continued with reasons why the argument is transparently bullshit when considered in toto and stated explicitly that there is no room for reasonable disagreement with the argument that the lena image should be retired.
posted by wierdo at 7:48 AM on February 4, 2019


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