JPEG file format is one of the most common image formats we still use today, but who would have thought that what led to the development of this file format was actually a photo.
Everything starts with a girl named Lena Sjööblom.
In 1972, Lena Sjööblom took on a modeling job as a Playboy, took a fruit photo, got a salary, and then continued her life 👇
This is the first and last time Lena took a fruit photo. After
, she rejected the private invitation of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner to take her to visit the mansion, and turned to Kodak to help technicians calibrate film lighting and color balance.
Her friends all thought it was fun to go to Playboy, and for Lena, that photo was a thing of the past.
But what Lena didn't know was that elsewhere in this world, she was changing the Internet.
A few months after the issue of Playboy was published, at the Institute of Signal and Image Processing at the University of Southern California, electrical engineer Alexander Sawchuk and his team are studying the computer's image processing algorithm.
During the research process, they use test images, a set of specific photos shared between imaging labs, and with it, it ensures that each lab tests their image compression algorithms by the same standards.
is right. It must be said that it is the work of the Alexander team that promoted the development of JPEG file format.
No one knows who brought Playboy to the institute that day, but it is certain that when the team needed to scan a new image to the HP 2100 minicomputer, they chose Playboy in November 1972.
They were tired of old test images and wanted a photo of someone’s face, interesting textures and glossy treatments to test the limits of the technology, and by chance, the insert Lena took was perfect.
So, they cut off the part above Lena's shoulders from the magazine, effectively ensuring the safety of the photos.
Some people attribute the cutting work to taste or wisdom; however, this may also be just a technical issue. Because the top of this page is 5.12 inches, it is especially suitable for Muirhead wirephoto scanners, which can generate a 512 x 512 pixel image.
This image is exactly in line with their purpose, and they provide the scan results to other researchers engaged in similar image processing tasks, and this image eventually became the standard for the entire industry.
actually had other test images in use at that time, but only Lena became the established standard agreed by laboratories across the country.
You should know that this photo of was taken in 1972 and then continued in the field of computer science for decades, and even in 2015, engineering students wrote columns for it.
Even so, Lena's photo has caused a lot of controversy.
For the next twenty years, Lena's image spread quietly, and Playboy didn't even notice it. It wasn't until 1991 when the industry journal Optical Engineering put Lena on their July cover that Playboy really noticed it and tried to redeem it, and eventually, the publisher could only allow the image to be used for educational and research purposes.
However, copyright infringement is not the cause of the dispute.
Tech World Explosive Growth of the Internet has provided a promising future for everyone, and women have also begun to build the world with men, manage BBS servers, MUDs and their own websites.
But women have never been able to compete with their male counterparts on the computer field.
So some people think that Lena's test image is just another product of patriarchal thought that ruled over the past three decades, and they think it's time to retire.David Munson Jr., editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing industry journal David Munson Jr. wrote an open letter in 1996 to deal with these complaints: If there is another image that can also meet your purpose, why not use another image?
And on the other hand, Lena has been living a peaceful life in Swedish for many years, completely unaware that his photos have caused such a big uproar among American computer geeks.
It was not until 1997 that she was invited to attend the 50th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Imaging Science and Technology that she understood the scope of her photo being used, not to mention that it has been regarded as the gold standard for more than 20 years.
Before that, she had never even been exposed to the internet.
That meeting was a surreal experience for Lena, not because the photos were used, but because all of these people, mainly white male engineers, who had never considered her real body existence before.
They have seen this weird scientific woman in their academic days, and they have carefully studied the pixels and colors of this set of pictures, but have never regarded her as a real person.
Moreover, it is this experimental attitude towards women's bodies and images that has made many women hesitate about entering this industry.
In 2015, Maddie Zug, a senior student at Thomas Jefferson Technology High School, published an op-ed in the Washington Post about her experience as one of the few female peers assigned to use Lena images for encoding projects.
The teacher warned them not to check this picture. But the reality is, the first thing everyone in that computer lab does is search for the original photos and put the entire insert on their screen.
"I was only 16 years old at the time and it was hard to believe that I was in a male-dominated computer science class. I tried to ignore the boys' sexual comments.
But why should an advanced science and technology engineering and mathematics school use Playboy's inserts in the classroom?"
To this day, female students in science and engineering still have many similar complaints:
Gender wage gap, more promotion opportunities for men, and gender discriminatory attitudes are still prevalent in the field of technology.
And Lena, now in her 70s, seems to have no strong opinion on using her image.
Although test images still haunt modern machines, just like nostalgia, current image processing researchers occasionally mention Lena in their papers.
However, in recent years, including the Society of Opticals, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and about 150 natural journals and institutions have announced that they will completely ban contributions on the subject of Lena.
Because for some people in the image processing field, Lena is a thing of the past.
After all, Lena's cropping image contains about 260,000 pixels, which is quite good for the era she was in, but the pixels of a picture taken by iPhone 11 have exceeded 12 million.
, look at it, nothing will last forever, whether it is beauty or standard.
- END -
Ref:
https://gizmodo.com/lena-test-image-playboy-how-sex-changed-internet-1849798731
text | Lightning
