<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"March 31st is the birthday of Lena S\u00F6derberg, one of the most well-know faces in the digital imaging community, and Playboy\u2019s Playmate of the Month for November 1972. Photographed by Dwight Hooker, she appeared under the name Lenna Sj\u00F6\u00F6blom, and the photograph called \u201CLenna\u201D or \u201CLena\u201D would become one of the most widely used digital images in tech history as the industry standard for algorithmic compression.\r\n\r\nLena\u2019s status as the standard for digital image testing began in 1973 when Alexander Sawchuk, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California\u2019s Signal and Image Processing Institute, was searching his lab for an image to scan for a colleague\u2019s conference paper. The standard image used at the time was black and white matte, so Sawchuck seized an opportunity when another engineer walked in with the colorful, glossy Playboy.\r\n\r\nTorn from the centerfold to wrap around the drum of the Muirhead wirephoto scanner they were using, the engineers only needed the top 5.12 inches of the photograph for the 100-pixel resolution scan. \u00A0The 512x512 digital image cropped the photograph at Lena\u2019s shoulders. Aside from Lena\u2019s arresting eye contact, the image had interesting color, texture, and lighting, making it a compelling test image for digital compression and transmission.\r\n\r\n\r\nThe 512x512 standard Lena test image\r\nFor educational purposes throughout the last 40 years, the image has been made available as a standard test image by USC Signal and Image Processing Institute, UCLA Image Communications Lab, Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science,\u00A0Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Waterloo Fractal Coding and Analysis Group, and the\u00A0University of Tennessee Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, among many others.\u00A0Lena also appears in many textbooks, including the authoritative\u00A0Digital Image Processing\u00A0by Rafael Gonzalez and Richard E. Woods, published by Prentice Hall.\r\n\r\n\r\nCover of Digital Image Processing with Lena image near center\u00A0\r\nA Google Scholar search for &amp;quot;Lena image&amp;quot; returns 11,400 academic articles including research from Nasa.gov\u00A0and research.microsoft.com.\u00A0&amp;quot;Lenna image&amp;quot; returns 1,680 research articles, showing that most scholars defer to the model's actual spelling of her name rather than the anglicized version she was dubbed by Playboy for their article.\r\n\u00A0From Nasa.gov article &amp;quot;DCT quantization matrices visually optimized for individual images&amp;quot; by Andrew B. Watson for the NASA Ames Research Center\r\nAccording to Allan Weber from the\u00A0USC Signal and Image Processing Institute, database downloads of Lena\u00A0within the last nine days of this article going to press,\r\nrepresented 10% of the downloads despite being only one of about 300 images in the database. A quick look at the list of downloaded images showed that it was easily the one most often downloaded. \u00A0I suspect that if we had data from a longer period of time it would probably be about this same portion of the traffic.\r\nAs for Playboy\u2019s position on the copyright of this particular photograph and its widespread use? Playboy understood her significance within the tech and academic community and even helped find the former model for the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997.\u00A0 At the time, Eileen Kent, VP of new media at Playboy stated, &amp;quot;We decided we should exploit this, because it is a phenomenon.&amp;quot; \u00A0The recognition of Lena as a digital \u201Cphenomenon\u201D indeed foreshadowed the current culture of viral memes.\r\n\r\nHaving graced the textbooks, scanners, and screens of thousands of members of the tech community since 1973, it is fair to say that Lena has earned her title as the First Lady of the Internet. Lena sits beautifully at the intersection of tech, education, art, pornography, and memes. While it isn\u2019t always polite to tell a woman\u2019s age, let\u2019s just say, \u201CHappy Birthday\u201D to the lovely sexagenarian."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/03/31/happy-birthday-to-lena-playboys-first-lady-of-the-internet/>