She is an IT goddess, but she has never written a line of code
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Everyone has a period of being single.
Like all companies where single people tend to gather, early image research experiments were a rather boring job.
These image coders do the same tests over and over again, and boredom is the norm in their work.
But these smart people have found some interesting ways to relieve loneliness.
They actually used photos of girls from the erotic magazine Playboy as research material to test the proportions and operating efficiency of various image compression algorithms.
The first guy who did this put the photo directly into his master's thesis.
It was clearly stated that the photo was from Playboy magazine, published in 1960.
The younger brother's behavior this time gave courage to his colleagues.
In 1970, the magazine fell into the hands of Alexander Sawchuk, an assistant professor at the Institute of Signal and Image Processing at the University of Southern California.
At that time, he was testing image compression algorithms, but the pictures he used were all very boring landscape pictures. He happened to flip through this issue of Playboy magazine and was instantly fascinated by Lenna's photo.
Alexander thought the bright colors and rich textures of the photo were very suitable for testing, and the beauty of the heroine Lenna in the picture was very attractive...
Professor Alexander took prompt action and tore off the exposed part of one of the photo pages, cut it into 512 x 512 size, and scanned it with a digital sensor to make a new photo test sample.
This photo, which will be extremely important in the field of computer graphics in the future, was born!
Later, in January 1996, David C. Munson, editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, cited two reasons for the popularity of the photo in the scientific community:
First, the image has a good mix of flat areas, shadows, and texture details, which are all good for testing various image processing algorithms. It's a great test photo!
Second, since this is a picture of a very attractive woman, it is not surprising that the image processing research industry, which is mostly made up of men, tends to use pictures that they find attractive.
Gradually, this photo spread throughout the industry and was tested over billions of times in image processing research.
On the other hand, the IT goddess herself was not aware of this, because information dissemination was not well developed in that era, not to mention that the entertainment circle and the scientific research circle were so far apart.
The protagonist's name is Lena Söderberg. After graduating from high school, she came to the United States to pursue her American dream.
Lena's photo at that time
Because she had worked as a jewelry model before, a photographer for Playboy magazine approached her and asked if she was interested in shooting the cover of the magazine in November of that year.
Since she wasn't well off financially, she agreed, and the magazine editor gave her a pseudonym "Lenna" with an extra "N".
After the photo shoot, she received a generous compensation. In the following years, she also shot film advertisements for Kodak. Unfortunately, she was unable to continue developing in the modeling industry.
She left the United States a few years later.
However, she didn't know that she had already become famous in the scientific research community.
There were even admirers who wrote love poems for her:
Oh, dear Raina, your beauty is too vast to describe quickly
If I could compress your image, I think I could shake the world
Alas, when I first used vector quantization, I found that your face was yours alone
How could the DCT match your long, silky hair
And your sexy lips, even if I exhausted thirteen supercomputers, I couldn't find the right fractal fragments to describe
Although these setbacks are so great, I may still be able to overcome them one by one
But when the filter took away the brilliance in your eyes, I can only say: "Forget it, just digitize it."
It is not difficult to see from this that a science and engineering man can also express love in his own language.
Unknowingly, she has been overseeing the development of the image processing industry for decades.
James Hutchinson, an engineer at the University of Illinois College of Engineering, commented:
What Lena did for programmers was what Rita Hayworth did for American soldiers in the trenches during World War II.
By the way, Rita Hayworth was hailed as the "Goddess of Love" during World War II, just like the "National Wife" today. Almost all American soldiers wanted to put her poster on the head of their beds in the barracks.
However, Lena herself was unaware of these comments from the scientific research community. As mentioned earlier, the flow of information was not well developed in that era, so that the technology circle and the entertainment circle did not know about this matter for decades.
Fortunately, in 1997, with the help of Playboy magazine, the organizers of the Image Science and Technology Conference (IS&T) formally invited Renner to attend the 50th anniversary conference held in Boston in May of that year.
Reina received a warm welcome at the conference. Looking at the scientific research materials about herself, she was surprised at her influence in the entire scientific and technological community.
Of course, he also had to sign photos for his fans, even though this moment came decades later.
She doesn't think it bothers her, it's part of her experience and a wonderful part of her life.
She may be a product of that era, but in the eyes of those programmers back then, she was their dream lover and spiritual pillar.
As someone who has written code, I know very well that people who do research in this field lead an extremely boring life, and can only fall in love with circuit boards.
Lena's presence was like the sunlight filtering through the treetops, shining onto the bald IT guy's head shrouded in haze.
This is no different from the beauty we are pursuing now.
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