Playboy image from 1972 gets ban from IEEE computer journals
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
- Fine directional texture (the weave of the hat, hair)
- Fine non-directed texture (the feathers)
- Fine detail (eye glint, lashes)
- Medium texture (reflected hair)
- Sharp edges
- Curved edges (mirror frame, shoulder)
- Smooth gradients (skin, blurred beams on left)
- A closeup face
- Color
- Strong contrasts
I'd love to see a consensus around a good alternative high-resolution test image that has a bit of all of that (and maybe with a Macbeth chart thrown in somewhere too) with appropriate licensing, but none of the suggested alternatives (e.g., cameraman, mandrill) that I've seen quite have everything or are of any better resolution.
One source that I have recently been using for test images for my experiments, though, is the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year finalists collection: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Ye...
The optimal lenna replacer, for boomers who think they can reasonably belabor this point
Just pay me up front, papi needs a quick cash fix scratches their neck and tries to swivel their head 360 degrees
Needless to say, I'm still offended. And I think we can all agree that no one should ever be offended.
Hint: this path or yours? It doesn't work. Feeling offended and asking others not to offend you has to be reasonable within society's moral values. They've changed, obviously. But there is a large group of conservatives (as in: the type who wants traditional values) who loathe that change. The group is significant enough that they can push back changes like these. Case in point: Trump got elected and ensured SCOTUS is now 6-3 conservative-progressive.
Hint: this little old glory jig of yours? You know why you're offended? Because you have no principles or values worth fighting for. But you want to fight for something. So you fight for an inglorious past. And you can't think of a better way than to skirmish with sjws at random.
We see you, and you are transparent to us. If you were above the struggle, you would say nothing. Yet you want to fight. You NEED to fight. We all do. And yet you have nothing worthwhile to fight for. So you fight us.
The problem with your approach is that your way of thinking will die, since it produces nothing new or worthwhile. To the degree that your views get presidence, there will be misery and gnashing of teeth, stagnation, and eventual failure of the empire built on your non-principles. But the cause of true justice will remain living, until victory.
If I was using an LLM, I wouldn't be beefing with you. I'd find some way to engage you while respecting your point of view.
Nope. I'm definitely a full 100% grade A human a*hole
Srsly, just hand over the 10k. I'll get the job done! Then we'll have thousands of Lena alternatives! And they'll be objectively better!
Lena contains about 250,000 pixels, some 32 times smaller than a picture snapped with an iPhone 6. And then there’s a quality problem: The most commonly used version of the image is a scan of a printed page. The printing process doesn’t produce a continuous image, but rather a series of dots that trick your eye into seeing continuous tones and colors. Those dots, Acton says, mean that the scanned Lena image isn’t comparable to photos produced by modern digital cameras.
[..] Scott Acton, the current editor of IEEE Transactions [..] and two former editors revived the old call for a ban, and proposed to the journal’s editorial board that IEEE Transactions institute a moratorium on Lena research. “In 2016,” he says, “demonstrating that something works on Lena isn’t really demonstrating that the technology works.”
the implication being that too many algorithms were trained on the Lenna image, to the point where the ASCII phrase LENA.JPG can now be expanded to the full original uncompressed image.
It, along with the Mandrill image, are quaint historic footnotes examples of types of images (drum scanned from magazine prints) that are no longer anything close to mainstream examples suitable for reference.
> it's surprisingly hard to find a good alternative test image.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.6429v3.pdf
uses a licenced image of Italian heartthrob Fabio Lanzoni with skin tones and fine detailed blond hair.
Regarding many images being trained, I have mixed feelings. I think that the modern approach of having a solid corpus of images is important for quantitative analysis, but it's also nice to have a well-known common image to eyeball for a quick qualitative check.
I like the kingfisher from your wiki link, winner of 2020. Maybe we need more than one image for tests: one with perfect contrast range, one for human skin, etc. Instead of looking for one perfect image.
It also fundamentally doesn’t fix the problem with it just being kind of a horny selection of an image in the first place, which is the other half of the complaint.
I’m not saying it’s something that keeps me up at night personally, other than it just being generally a little tasteless. But for those who do argue against the use of Lena, it really satisfies none of the arguments other than the purest copyright one (and it may not even be legal to use in all jurisdictions because of personal likeness concerns anyway).
If you’re gonna get new material, get new material. Not just Legally Distinct Lana.
Stable image reconstruction using total variation minimization
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Stable-Image-Reconstru...
Oh man, if only this were true.
I 100% respect Lenna's wishes to stop using the image. I have a small tinge of regret based on some of the comments in the subthread, but it is for the better.
I even own a copy of the Playboy this was taken from, but funny thing is, I have never opened it. It is on my shelf next to the Utah Teapot. I guess in a way, I could justify it as one less use of the images.
40 years ago we used one particular image to test compression and certain DSP operations. Now in the age of CGI, TBs rather than KBs of storage / bandwidth, and the internet, we can use a suite of examples. These can be more varied, more controlled, and less encumbered by copyright or being from an erotic publication.
MP3 was apparently tested against the a capella song "Tom's Diner." Nice song, lots of detail on the voice. But is the benchmark I want to be using nowadays for Opus and AAC? Probably not.
It's a shame rules have to be made to force behavior. But whatever people's philosophical views, it should be a prompt to ensure we do have things to fill this role that have benefited from those last 40 years of development.
> It's a shame rules have to be made to force behavior.
„Have to“ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the sentence. Is this rule really necessary (because Lena’s gaze is just to enticing and leading the whole field astray)? Or is it just a method for moral crusaders to declare victory and their morals as supreme?
Personally I don’t care either way, I just like to understand differing perspectives. Being offended by this one seems fairly reasonable as far as things go though.
Very attractive people of both the equivalent and opposite gender exist. I can't speak to your instincts and interpretations, but objectively they are not a threat to my emotions.
0: and this is very rough edged caricature, no reason gender has to be specified here or subject has to be ignored
That’s the problem: it’s nothing to do with what people do in their private lives, it’s about bringing pornography into a professional context. In this case it’s also objectively an obsolete choice for anyone working on modern imaging technology so it’s not even defensible on technical merits.
I've seen, although from great distances, enough of these instances. They WILL come at that person and harder in those cases. Sexual content are less likely to be cancelled when more male is involved, contrary to superficial reasoning. This applies even if gender of creators are not apparent at all. It's a really gross primal phenomenon.
> Sexual content are less likely to be cancelled when more male is involved, contrary to superficial reasoning.
It’s true that many men don’t mind sexualizing women, but that’s restating the problem that this creates a hostile atmosphere for everyone else.
And it's also an hallucination when you say it, given that it's not even close to the issues raised and just a straw man.
I don't think that's it. I think it's the idea that Playboy objectifies women, and "porn" objectifies people. Which is understandable.
From that lens, Lena's picture could be seen as the IEEE equivalent of plastering the locker room doors with porn mag photos.
Playboy shows no intercourse (AFAIK, been a while), it contains stories and background info, and professional and entertaining poses. It falls firmly in the category of softporn.
I know this is a Whataboutism 101, and you could say 'it is objectified woman in marginalized profession'. I'm not saying I disagree. What I am saying is that there must be a long road ahead. It seems the cat is out of the bag?
Now, my daughter is in pre-puberty. Back when I was in puberty, I bought a Playboy or two and one Penthouse. Would I have an issue if my daughter bought a magazine with men (and/or women) posing (half-)naked if she were in puberty? I'd be surprised, given what you can find for free on the internet, with [much] worse curation. No, that seems normal to me, even healthy to be curious like that. But I am honestly scared shitless of all the crap which can be found on certain websites, as well as things happening in school like revenge porn (which recently became illegal within its own category in my country; a step I very much agree with).
My point being that, to me, there seem to be much worse issues ahead worth tackling.
It's equivalent to having a poster of a woman in the office bathroom. Have it in your own home, it's fine, but don't push it on others.
I'm not for or against cancel culture, btw. I understand pros, but also cons.
A poster of a woman, would depend on what that entails. If it is a poster with a function, with the face of a woman, it'd be OK. No matter the source. The source ought to be OK with it (with regards to copyright) but other than that, I don't find it relevant. Because people don't see the source; they see the derivative.
As an analogy, would you run code by a convicted murderer? As in, would you be opposed to run code programmed by Hans Reiser? Ie. would you use Btrfs? Would you run code by a company who are morally bankrupt?
Your last whataboutisms aren't relevant. If people don't like having to work with an image whose origin is from a porn magazine and which the woman has asked people to stop using it, that's a perfectly valid feeling.
If they're not fine with it they can pick an alternative. One was posted in this very thread.
The woman in question and the author of the picture were also OK with it in past, right? Not like it was a case of copyright infringement?
I'm sure there are also people who deeply care about not using programs written by a convicted criminal. Most people don't realize that when they use Linux because it is hidden in plain sight. Just like the fact that this photograph is from a pornography magazine, and that the woman in question was naked (softcore still), is obscure as well. Obscure in this context also means harmless. Ie. I can show this portrait picture of this woman to my pre-puberty daughter, and it'd be completely OK. Just like running Linux kernel with code by a convicted murderer is also OK. OK, as in harmless.
My pre-puberty daughter is a great case of where I draw the line between NSFW, ie. with regards to recent terrorism in Russia and torture of suspects. Would I feel ashamed if she saw this picture of Lena? Not at all. If needed, I could tell her the context of it being a picture from a different time in our past with different society moral values (though they're still very much alive in some areas in the world).
There is also a huge difference between hardcore intercourse and a (half-)naked, posing woman. And of the former, with women who are exploited, is much more rampant on the internet. That seems to be a valid hill to die on.
It's not obscure for the scientists working in this field, so what you deem moral or not for your teenager is irrelevant. Especially so when the scientists in this field have voiced their opinion which should count far more. Why should they not be heard? Why are you the one trying to cancel the opinions of these female scientists?
Look, the point here is not whether using the image is a good idea or not; it's about whether an organization such as IEEE should ban it. The fact that using this image is technically a disaster (for all the technical reasons presented by so many people) only makes it easier for the ban to be instated and convince people like you that it's ok to do that. But the fact is that the technical reasons were not what supported the ban, and when you keep defending it using other arguments which are not the ones that led to the ban, you're just feeding a monster.
Isn't IEEE made up of people?
> If people don't want to work with this image, then they might as well not work with it?
Lucky for you that you're oblivious to these kind of issues, but it's not as easy as you portray it to be. Most people will shut up and "just accept it" to not stir the pot. People aren't writing a paper in isolation using this, so can't easily just switch if the rest of the community uses it to benchmark, the co-authors want to use it etc.
> and convince people like you that it's ok to do that.
Please define "people like me". Tread carefully.
> and when you keep defending it using other arguments which are not the ones that led to the ban, you're just feeding a monster.
Don't lie. I've only used the arguments put forward by IEEE in the article.
Pornography aside, YouTube had effectively removed "die" from vocabulary in some languages through that, and people are adapting by changing accents. Soon it'll be a shibboleth. We're literally living 1984.
I mean also this is a scientific publication which should try to stray towards neutrality and this image is a cropped playboy still. This is blatantly not an appropriate image to use in an academic publishing not even getting into copyright issues. If you absolutely need to use a photo of a beautiful woman for your testing you could use literally any photo taken in a standard photo shoot which isn’t overly sexualized that is appropriately licensed.
I remember this article where some girl dropped her PhD to do onlyfans and made like millions in very short time. Wonder what she was offended by? Perhaps offensively expensive tutoring costs, or generally non-competitive pay in academia which it seems is not to be discussed as something researchers from all genders are usually put off by?
Sorry, this is such a hypocritical nonsense to ban the Lena image, that it really amazes me somebody cared to be so politically correct while on a daily basis a researcher around the world is marginalised by their seniors by not being listed as the first author of an article. THAT is offensive, not some pixels in the age of TikTok and Insta.
It's weird that papers are banned based on which sample images they pick, rather than technical merits.
When will the HeLa cell line papers be cancelled? To this day scientific experiments are being carried out on cells take from a black woman without her consent.
The IEEE is acting now, so her current position seems most relevant. It’s not the primary reason - that’s the technical limitations and general wisdom of using pornography in professional publications – but it’s a good third point. Switching is trivially easy, why not do what the subject requests?
Your comparison with HeLa is interesting because it directly highlights the difference: nobody’s work depends on LENNA.JPG - anyone doing serious work is using multiple images, and there are many easy alternatives so nobody’s paper is getting rejected unless they throw a performative tantrum trying to get an interview with Tucker Carlson.
HeLa is different in several ways: it does things which other cell lines could not, allowing some fundamental research to be performed which wasn’t possible when cell lines could only survive for a few days, and the owner isn’t around to tell us how she feels about this. Most relevant, of course, is the reaction in the field: you know about that because it’s been widely recognized as an ethical failure, it’s taught as such in schools, there’s going to be a building named after her on Johns Hopkins’ campus, and there’s a scholarship fund in her honor.
Lenna’s contribution is far less significant from an academic standpoint but I can’t help but notice that none of the people complaining are actually doing anything which would benefit her – it’s all about personal entitlement to continue using her photo without compensation.
I wonder why you mean she's incapable of making her own decisions? I hope it has nothing to do with her sex, but I do feel it's weird how you and others in this thread are very quick to dismiss both her and the women scientists not wanting to use the picture. It paints a picture..
Indeed you can argue that usage of pornographic material in academic articles is similarly offensive as going to school with horn implants. Or perhaps the horn implants are not so offensive? But then the question here is whether the image of someone's face, which originates from a pornographic material is offensive. I find it hard to make a concrete decision about this, because Lena's face (and many other women and men's faces) is very very lovely taken out of the pornographic context. Besides pornography seems offensive only to few people as a percent of the world's population...
This also reminds me how children across the world answer the question whether a drawing of a head is image of a person or image of a head. If I remember this correctly, a story was told by psychology teacher back in school, so long time ago, the children in Europe see a person, the children of natives in Northern America see a head. So this all is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? Thus being offended by the usage of Lena image implies the author knows the source of it and imagines the missing pornographic part.
Also what is your obsession with "horn implants" and "third tit"s
> time to bring it back then, alongside horn implants, and third tit.
Then, and only then, will I know that meaningful change has taken place.
https://media.wired.com/photos/5c5354d391d0df22c1dee493/mast...
Aren’t there more technical solutions to DSP/image processing reference images that enable readers to get a more accurate assessment of results in a shorter time span?
Or are humans naturally that hard-wired to commonplace imagery?
I know colour perception for instance is extremely biased based on the context around it, so a Monet is perceived radically differently than for instance, a Pantone Catalogue in isolation
Nothing of importance has changed here. Looking at the picture, I fail to see why this is so controversial. I guess somebody doesn't like that it was in Playboy at one point? This is a picture people, not a mountain to die on.
Who paid $$$ to send this message? Why?
I like the alt ones where people have created a guy version of this photo. Super cute!
https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/
Hahaha! :)