How did the owner of Playboy help create a JPEG image format?

It may sound unbelievable, but it is a photo in Playboy's "adult" magazine that has set the stage for humanity to use a convenient and useful JPEG image compression format.

The sexy artistic heritage and 'adult ' pictures left by the founder of Playboy and cultural icon Hugh Hefner have become a hot topic for thousands of online conversations since the death of he was on Wednesday. But the rare thing that anyone knows is that in addition to the 'adult' magazine I left, Huge Hefner gave mankind a surprise gift, a gift that later influenced the world of photography carefully. Digital: It is a photo that appeared in the publication of the Playboy magazine published in 1972 which was later used as a test in creating today's widely used image processing standards such as JPEG and MPEG.

Indeed, Hefner's 'headboard' magazine published a seductive photograph that few people expected to turn into an invaluable resource for many generations of computer scientists. The final image has become the most widely used test image for image processing algorithms. The owner of the photo, model Lena Soderberg (Lenna) in English, was later honored as the "First Lady of the Internet".

The strange milestone of this computer science originated in 1973, when the deputy professor of electrical engineering at the USC Signal Research Institute and Image Processing (SIPI), Mr. Alexander Sawchuk is looking for a picture. Newly more attractive - priority is given to the human face - to scan for a colleague's research project, one person enters the room under the Playboy publication in November 1972.

After a bit of discussion, the group decided to fold the photo into three parts, tear off the top so that the photo could fit better with the already connected Muirhead scanner with an analog signal converter to the technique. numbers for red, green, blue and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. They wanted to scan a 512x512 resolution photo from that printer - inherently 100 lines per inch, so researchers The rescue scanned only 5.12 inches of 'art' of the photo, leaving the nude part of the model Lena.

The nude picture of model Lena Soderberg became a "gold standard" for testing and establishing image processing algorithms from the 73s.

And so the green, blue and red trio of 512 lines each became the 'gold' format for processing and compressing digital images. Other researchers eventually turned to using Lena's photo to test their own image algorithm, leading to a dizzying photo of SIPI reaching other groups years later.

The next story was a non-public copyright dispute between Playboy and the photo users, resulting in an unofficial settlement that was done with Playboy in the early 1990s, turning the image that is already as popular as alcohol rose to become a symbol in the image processing community.

Some others praised the image for other 'great' contributions. The nude picture of model Lena Soderberg researchers honed their algorithms, and later finished high compression ratios that allowed computers to display more images - something that Jeff Seiderman, President The Association for Visual Science and Technology (IS&T), said that it has actually created digital media as well as the entire Internet.

"Lena" is probably, and will continue, the most analyzed picture in world digital history.

The owner of the photo, Lena Soderberg, finally accepted his role as a 'heroine' of the digital image processing industry by appearing at the 50th anniversary of IS&T held in 1997. It was not until the last few years that people stopped using this image as a "guideline" for testing image processing algorithms, partly because of the 'sexy' history of the image, partly because of the modern modern algorithms. also pass the test threshold of this picture.

Just as the apple fell to the head of physicist Sir Isaac Newton, the photo of Playboy Lena Soderberg became the "gold standard" for the digital image processing industry, contributing to the creation of popular photo formats day by day. Now, like JPEG or MPEG, it's completely random, but maybe we can't help but be thankful for that coincidence, and once again, whoever says that the legacy of Huge Hefner is just a big mansion. with the famous porn magazine?