How a Playboy Playmate Helped Make the Internet Beautiful

Contrary to what you might think, this photo was not snapped over the weekend using Instagram's Valencia filter. It's known as Lenna and as Motherboard points out, it's one of the oldest, most widely used test picture used for all kinds of image processing algorithms.

The real name of the subject is Lena Soderberg, and the picture was actually cropped from the November 1972 Playboy centerfold. The name was later anglicized to Lenna. It was picked because late one an assistant professor at USC's Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) needed something not totally boring to scan for a colleague's conference paper. Everything else was old and dull (read: lacked pretty ladies, lacked breasts) and so thank god for Playboy. IEEE told the story back in a newsletter in 2001:


So there you have it. The picture is not just memorable because it's of a foxy—probably naked but you can't tell because it's cropped—lady. It's also an important piece of digital history. [IEEE via Vice]