this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 117 points 7 months ago (5 children)

This is not a hill I'd want to die on, but I do understand thinking this photo is fine. If I hadn't been told it was from Playboy, I wouldn't give it a second thought. It's a conventionally-attractive woman in a hat showing a little shoulder. I wouldn't be upset over Michaelangelo's David either. It is less sexual than like 90% of modern TV or mass-market advertising. I suspect a similar image of "cleaner" provenance would not garner much attention at all, honestly.

But it is weird that an image from such a source was chosen in the first place. It is understandable that it makes people uncomfortable, and it seems like there should be no shortage of suitable imagery that wouldn't, so...easy sell, I'd think.

On a related note, boy oh boy am I tired of every imagegen AI paper and project using the same type of vaguely fetishized portraits as examples.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Which is still weird.

Alexander Sawchuk, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California ... 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. ... 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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Everything about the story sounds like it was a rush job, a decision made on a whim, after exhausting their existing catalog of test images. And who bring a Playboy mag to their university's computer lab, and advertises their possession? They don't even say who it was, probably to protect them from any embarrassing professional consequences. To me, that's probably the strongest reason to retire it: it's unprofessional.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 months ago

And who bring a Playboy mag to their university's computer lab, and advertises their possession?

Probably a random grad student. They were just coming out of the "sexual revolution" of the 60s at that point. It'd be a lot weirder ten years earlier or ten years later.

That a similar thing did happen ten years earlier is the weird part, I think.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

No there's not, the scan thats been used has cropped out the nudity, it's in like the second paragraph,

Usage of the Lenna image in image processing began in June or July 1973 when an assistant professor named Alexander Sawchuck and a graduate student at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute scanned a square portion of the centerfold image with a primitive drum scanner, omitting nudity present in the original image. They scanned it for a colleague's conference paper, and after that, others began to use the image as well.

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[–] [email protected] 105 points 7 months ago (7 children)

Here is an uncropped version of the image: [NSFW] https://mypmates.club/1972/Miss-November/Lena-Soderberg

Considering this it's more understandable that it's controversial.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 7 months ago (2 children)

A lot of people in this thread have a lot of really strong opinions without actually reading the article. The model was cool with it, but she herself also thinks it’s time to retire the photo from how it’s being used in image processing, where it likely isn’t even necessary in the first place. Respect her on that. I seriously doubt she cares if it remains accessible on the web for the pervs worrying about censorship. It’ll still be there if you desperately don’t want to lose your opportunity to take a gander.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 7 months ago (2 children)

There’s also value in not basing your image compression algorithm on a low resolution scan of a magazine from the 1970s.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago

Seems like this is a much more important than any of the other discussions going on. How many results were tainted by the fact that they were compressing a dithered print image.

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[–] ICastFist 33 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Forsén is quoted as saying, "I retired from modelling a long time ago. It’s time I retired from tech, too. We can make a simple change today that creates a lasting change for tomorrow. Let’s commit to losing me."

Since Lena herself decided she wanted to retire the image, I don't have any qualms with them not accepting new papers using it. It's really weird that her "big break" came from scientific papers, of all things.

I do wonder, however, if more recent papers (2010 and forward) using that image were doing so as reference to older papers, or entirely contained to their own research.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (22 children)

This is kinda interesting. I work in this field and have seen that image show up all the time in papers but never knew the origins.

I think it's the right move to ban it and I'm surprised there's so many people defending it. This isn't about censorship or being a prude or anything like that. It's just a bit weird that it's from a playboy and if you can't understand how that would make some people uncomfortable then you might be a bit lacking in empathy.

The 3d world has Utah teapots and Stanford bunnies and dragons which are all very neutral and don't hurt anyone. Perhaps we can move on and use some less alienating pictures for image processing papers, too.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'm wary of the argument for any practice continuing being just because it's always happened and is "tradition". Similarly though I'm wary of the argument that a valid practice should cease just because it makes a few people uncomfortable. If the only thing going for the Lena image is "tradition" then there really is no argument for keeping it.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (8 children)

It's a woman looking over their shoulder

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago

It's an unlicensed picture of a woman who was previously fine with it being used like this, but who recently changed her mind and thinks it's time to stop.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

For the curious, you can find the uncropped photo by searching Lemmy posts for "Lenna". It was posted to [email protected] a few months ago.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Here's a comment on said NSFW post

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

https://lemmy.world/comment/6629261

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Huh, I am sorry, I feel too dumb but I don't want to live with the doubt, I read the article and the Wikipedia links and I still don't know how this is a thing, this is the first time I know about it.

What exactly was the meaning of this image in the tech fields? "What image processing tests"?

I understand the model is tired of it already, but this won't disappear from the Internet, how is this article gonna benefit her?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago

https://youtu.be/yCdwm2vo09I

Here you go. A full explanation of everything.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

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.)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (15 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I've seen more skin in a Sears catalogue in the 90s. Yeah I was a teenager shut up. People need to get over themselves.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

people who are offended by images of other people are narcissists

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Huh I had no idea!

I'm pretty sure I compressed that image in our computer vision class with some alogrithm we implemented for exercise. I though that was just some artsy over the shoulder picture, but seeing the full version the shoulder does seems supicious in hindsight.

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