Technology

Apparently the team making the first scanner needed a good test photo and that was the best they had on hand at that moment in terms of color variation and intensity.

There's a bit more to the scan. You usually see the cropped version, but the full version has naughty bits. Not sure if it's ever been published that way in journals.

Some people are triggered by nudity. On another timeline the conclusion of this "scandal" would be to include a retro photo of a naked dude in the test image data set (and maybe also switch Lena's photo if she doesn't want it in there anymore).

There’s a value to having a standard image or images that are used to assess compression algorithms’ performance. It could just as easily be a picture of a bouquet of flowers, or a bunch of puppies.

I think it's nice to have traditions inside areas of research, and if somebody said "let's retire the Utah teapot. It's too simple a construct and has no bearing anymore" I'd be opposed.

Similar with "Lenna". Is it a good test image? Not anymore, but if somebody wants to include it as tradition then let them. It hurts no one. Nobody is making money off it. Most people just know it as an image that's been in many seminal graphics papers they want to emulate, but even if they do know it as being from an issue of Playboy, why is that a problem?

I'm not angry about it. I'm not going to die on any hill about it. I just see it as pointless and infantile for the IEEE to refuse papers over something so trivial.

It's a cropped image of a naked woman looking over her shoulder out of a playboy magazine. I think it's reasonable to stop using it for academic papers. You can still look at it all you want though.

Here's a comment on said NSFW post

I won't link the post directly as it's NSFW

https://lemmy.world/comment/6629261

Computers are dumb and need to be told how to take the data of an image (stored as a long series of 1s and 0s in memory) and draw it on the screen so you can see it. The people writing the software to do that needed an image to test with, just to make sure everything was working right.

Either because they were a bunch of lonely geeks in the 70s or they didn't have any other good photos to scan in, they used a headshot of a PlayBoy model. They couldn't have known that it would effectively become one of the first digital memes, meaning it's still semi-frequently used by graphics programmers (professionals and enthusiasts).

I can't claim to speak on the model's motives, but it's not hard to imagine that having their headshot used in perpetuity without consent would make someone uncomfortable.

https://youtu.be/yCdwm2vo09I

Here you go. A full explanation of everything.

Basically, people working on graphics-related algorithms needed to build a library of standard test images, so that when people published their work in an academic journal, they could easily demonstrate what that algorithm does, in a manner that is fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with the image.

So someone, when they needed to pick an image that represents a person, scanned this photograph. And it could be argued that at the time, it was probably an interesting test image for a lot of reasons: person vs background, different textures, areas with soft and sharp focus, etc etc. If you developed, say, an image compression algorithm, those things are going to be headache in all photo portraits.

It's probably not the best image by modern standards (being a low resolution scan of a photograph off of a printed magazine - not a photo print scan, not a direct film scan, and not comparable to digital photography). Also, it's gotten overused to the point of absurdity. (Oh your hot new face detection algorithm works on this image? Well whoop-de-do.)

i think i've seen it used to demo different image compression algorithms, things like that. it was used as an easy example test image, but this journal has now banned papers from using it because it is weird and creepy to be using cropped porn for that. this won't benefit the model, but she was only pushing to ban it because she wants more women in IT fields.