This is amusing. I did my undergraduate thesis on expanding my professors work on block truncation coding for image compression and this is the image that was used. I always figured my prof used it because it was a pretty woman and I even recall the filename was lena.raw.

Is it sad that my first exposure to Lenna was the LenPEG "compression" algorithm?

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/lenpeg.html

As stated, it really is the defacto image used in image processing communities. Much like the Utah Teapot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot), which you might recognize from using 3DSMax or similar software.

or tsukuba(http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clz/Exam1Real.jpg) in stereovision

I study in computer vision. One of the professors in our department had some of his papers refused by some publishers. They thought it was morally unacceptable to put a playmate's face in the paper.

I applaud such moral rectitude. After all, people who regularly accept grants from the military in order to develop, say, automatic target recognition systems, cannot possibly blemish their immaculate reputation by publishing a cropped image of a tasteful, artistic photo of a gorgeous naked woman.

Looks like all the rumours about the academics' lack of testicular fortitude have been confirmed...

Until reading this I had no idea about the background story to this classic test image. It's faintly amusing, given the contemporary hysteria surrounding copyright, that the cropped face of Lenna was actually a flagrant copyright violation which has been perpetrated in academic papers for decades.

I wonder how much of an image corpus you can get from Wikimedia (CC) files.

You could find much better test images, that’s for sure. Lenna looks like what it is: old-style film printed fairly well and then scanned fairly well. It has a strong color cast and no full black. It’s only used everywhere because it’s already used everywhere.

I had never seen the original, full picture. There's something in the background that's somewhat disturbing...

Is it the baby doll?

More links:

http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html

http://ndevilla.free.fr/lena/