Apparently the team making the first scanner needed a good test photo and that was the best they had on hand at that moment in terms of color variation and intensity.

There's a bit more to the scan. You usually see the cropped version, but the full version has naughty bits. Not sure if it's ever been published that way in journals.

Some people are triggered by nudity. On another timeline the conclusion of this "scandal" would be to include a retro photo of a naked dude in the test image data set (and maybe also switch Lena's photo if she doesn't want it in there anymore).

There’s a value to having a standard image or images that are used to assess compression algorithms’ performance. It could just as easily be a picture of a bouquet of flowers, or a bunch of puppies.

It's not like they were using the uncropped centerfold. There's nothing wrong with the headshot. It's a woman in a hat.

I mean, the model in question was quoted as recently as 2019 as saying she had no problem with it, so hardly 50 years.

I don't think it would be in humanity's best interest for scientific journals to be in the habit of quickly banning research just because someone has uncomfortable associations with a safely cropped photo (or a drawing, or a quote). Perhaps it makes sense in this particular case, after careful consideration. I hope it's an exceptional case. Censorship is a slippery slope.

TBH from article it seems that woman on photo (Forsén) decided that's enough of sharing her photo.

Yeah, you're right.

But I'm a little optimistic. The image being widely used for decades is a symptom, not the cause of women being unwelcome.

With it being finally banned, it seems like this is changing. Hopefully this means the root cause, misogyny in tech, is at an all time low.

I think it's nice to have traditions inside areas of research, and if somebody said "let's retire the Utah teapot. It's too simple a construct and has no bearing anymore" I'd be opposed.

Similar with "Lenna". Is it a good test image? Not anymore, but if somebody wants to include it as tradition then let them. It hurts no one. Nobody is making money off it. Most people just know it as an image that's been in many seminal graphics papers they want to emulate, but even if they do know it as being from an issue of Playboy, why is that a problem?

I'm not angry about it. I'm not going to die on any hill about it. I just see it as pointless and infantile for the IEEE to refuse papers over something so trivial.

Computers are dumb and need to be told how to take the data of an image (stored as a long series of 1s and 0s in memory) and draw it on the screen so you can see it. The people writing the software to do that needed an image to test with, just to make sure everything was working right.

Either because they were a bunch of lonely geeks in the 70s or they didn't have any other good photos to scan in, they used a headshot of a PlayBoy model. They couldn't have known that it would effectively become one of the first digital memes, meaning it's still semi-frequently used by graphics programmers (professionals and enthusiasts).

I can't claim to speak on the model's motives, but it's not hard to imagine that having their headshot used in perpetuity without consent would make someone uncomfortable.

https://youtu.be/yCdwm2vo09I

Here you go. A full explanation of everything.

Basically, people working on graphics-related algorithms needed to build a library of standard test images, so that when people published their work in an academic journal, they could easily demonstrate what that algorithm does, in a manner that is fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with the image.

So someone, when they needed to pick an image that represents a person, scanned this photograph. And it could be argued that at the time, it was probably an interesting test image for a lot of reasons: person vs background, different textures, areas with soft and sharp focus, etc etc. If you developed, say, an image compression algorithm, those things are going to be headache in all photo portraits.

It's probably not the best image by modern standards (being a low resolution scan of a photograph off of a printed magazine - not a photo print scan, not a direct film scan, and not comparable to digital photography). Also, it's gotten overused to the point of absurdity. (Oh your hot new face detection algorithm works on this image? Well whoop-de-do.)

i think i've seen it used to demo different image compression algorithms, things like that. it was used as an easy example test image, but this journal has now banned papers from using it because it is weird and creepy to be using cropped porn for that. this won't benefit the model, but she was only pushing to ban it because she wants more women in IT fields.

It does not seem like you heard the arguments presented in the article. It isn't about being offended by any left or right wing politics, but because women engineers and scientists were uncomfortable about it for a variety of reasons. In a field which struggles to attract and keep female talent, this is a pretty big thing. The model herself spoke out and asked to be "retired from tech".

I have a friend who is a sex freelance journalist writing for everyone from the NYT to Playboy and she's been outspoken recently around a neo-puritan movement by younger generations.

People aren't having as much sex, have a lot more hangups about sex, are uncomfortable with sex depicted in media, etc.

This image didn't even contain nudity - it's a crop of the original that's in question.

There are broader social impacts for seemingly innocuous efforts like these, and I don't know it's all that healthy for us to be constantly self-thought policing when it comes to sex. Those attitudes seem to be moving beyond the immediate focus and into general attitudes and behaviors around sexual hangups.

We're seeing "purity culture"-like mentality infecting people who weren't even raised in oppressive religious contexts.