A good portion of the world and Lenna herself have asked that image be retired.
Her full quote btw:
“Once upon a time, I was the centerfold of Playboy,” says the former model in the new documentary Losing Lena. “But I retired from modeling a long time ago. It’s time I retired from tech, too.”
And as several journals have brought up in the banning, it's not even good at what it purports to be for these use cases. It's a pretty poor quality image to start off with due to being scanned to a digital file with 1970s technology.
At this point the ones defending its continued use are the vocal minority on some weird anti-woke crusade that doesn't even make sense on technical grounds.
There is a large body of literature using these images so it’s helpful to have a comparison which is persistent through time and familiar.
> Given that it's use is banned in most academic journals dealing with imaging/graphics, you'd be wrong.
Critical thinking caps required for this one.
> Most people don’t care and a few vocal ones do.
"Lena doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Sawchuk and his imitators for how they appropriated her image; the only note of regret she expressed was that she wasn’t better compensated. In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said."
> I think we have a classic case of being offended on another’s behalf.
Definitely!
Or, a standard cropped image of a playgirl used in the field of image processing.
"very low frequency detail", we are talking about a 512x512 picture here, it has low and high frequency details (FFT speaking) like most photos.
"Good for edges detection" doesn't mean anything. Like, is the image good for edge detection or the algorithm is good at detecting edges ? What does "subjective edges" even mean ? Does it mean hard to spot ?
That looks like technical reasons but it just noise. They literally grab a playboy magazine and decided it was well enough (and indeed, it wasn't that bad, yes). Still not professional. The message is "We have playboy magazines at work and we are proud of it".