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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

Huh. Even after having used that classic Lena image in the header for multiple visualization projects, I never knew she was naked in the full version.

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Further reading:

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

This paper uses Fabio instead of Lena for that reason:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6429

Because sexy men are less NSFW than sexy women?

It was an expression of distaste for the practice of using a playboy shot as a scientific standard.

Did the author tell you that?

Yes:

> “My coauthor (asked): ‘What image do you want to use? How do you feel about the Lena image?’ And, I said ‘Definitely not.’” Her coauthor wholeheartedly agreed. And then Needell half-joked: “We should go against the grain and use a Fabio image or something, a male model.” And from there, they both decided to use the image and “take a stance.”

> “I don’t know if the Fabio image will take off but I think what it will do is… stick in people’s minds. And when they think about using the Lena image, they might think (about) using at least a neutral image.”

https://www.cmc.edu/news/every-picture-tells-a-story

Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), 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. They had tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. 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, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512 x 512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders.

Cited from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/

Yeah, that was my first thought, "Wow...that's the rest of that image?"

After reading many of these articles I never thought that either. No body ever seemed to mention it.

Unfortunately, whenever someone mentions that Lena was a nude model (perhaps to suggest objecting to the image's use in academic settings as an appropriate testbed), everyone gets angry. Negative reinforcement, I suppose.

That negative reinforcement yields good results though.

To clarify: the only meaning "good results" could refer to is the continued use of a cropped piece of pornography as a standard test image for image research for over twenty years.

Oh, but aren't all SFW pictures cropped pieces of pornography at the end of the day?

If you expand the field of view enough eventually there's going to be people having sex in it.

Not necessarily. If the camera and primary subject are in an enclosed room, all you're ever going to get is more wall.

Of course not, and its really worrisome that you think that. Most of the set of grey scale 50x50 pixel images are not crops by the simple fact that they contain no correlations at all, that's simple combinatorics.

Is that actually already pornography?

Well, from context its pretty clear it is intended to be used as pornography and I think that's good enough to label it as such.

I just meant, that western society seems to have become more accepting since the photo was shot, and these days people might classify it as an 'artsy nude' instead?

Which is why I think it would be really interesting to run a set of Robert Mapplethorpe's photos on it to see how they are classified. Some of his photographs are much more explicit while at the same time are much more specifically art. He photographed a lot of posed homoerotic BDSM Large Format photos specifically staged to develop tension, but not necessarily or even usually sexual tension or disgust tension, between the viewer and the person posed in the photo as a person and as a form. Alternatively he photographed large format calla lilies or orchids that are explicitly erotic. The photos were almost always black and white, and were s seen as controversial when he was alive and then again right when he died.

Then, in contrast, run some Japanese woodblocks in the Ukiyo-e style, since many of those are actually explicit. (including straight up porn woodblocks) Most Japanese woodblocks are also highly stylized as well, and it can take a moment to realize what is going on, including in some of the pornographic or hinting at the explict/could be explict/explict personalities.

I'm not going to say all Robert Mapplethorpes are safe for all work environments, nor all Japanese woodblocks, but I am curious to know if it can see the difference of person in homoerotic outfit who looks physical and gets you to notice his form, vs a Suzuki Harunobu being a bit more sly but more more explict in he is telling a story and his story is sex

I don't think you can take something which was once meant to be erotic pornography and add time to make it an 'artsy nude.' But if you can point to an example from the history of art, that would make your claim more reasonable.

I've always thought that was part of the joke.

It's a Playboy centerfold...

Then you probably did not know she's more attractive in the full version ;)

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