Xiaocha Guo Yipu Qianming compiled from Wired
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She was the cover girl of Playboy magazine, but she never expected that by chance she would become the number one goddess in the computer graphics industry.

Her status is even no less than that of Facebook founder Zuckerberg and Apple co-founder Wozniak .

Whether you know her name or face, you use her technology every day without even realizing it. You owe her a debt of gratitude for every photo you take, every website you visit, every emoji you share.

She is Lena Forsen, the "guardian angel" who has promoted the development of image processing in the past 50 years .

Don’t be surprised if you see Lena’s image at the beginning of a computer vision paper. Her photos for Playboy have been the test standard for image processing for decades.

In the male-dominated computer field, beautiful cover girls always inspire engineers. An editor of an IEEE publication said when introducing Lena: Lena is to computer engineers what Rita Hayworth was to American soldiers in World War II.

It’s like some programmers set their computer desktops to look like Yui Aragaki or Asuka Saito, and they even feel motivated to write code!

Lena attended the 50th Annual Image Technology Conference held in Boston in 1997, and her real appearance made the engineers crazy. At that time, she was asked for autographs by countless people, overshadowing any other participating scholars.

Jeff Seideman, former president of the Image Science and Technology Society, recalled that Lena's presence at the conference caused a sensation among his peers, and some people realized that the picture they had been looking at for 25 years was actually a person, not just a picture.

How many engineers have been inspired by this photo and have worked in the field of computer graphics for decades.

The Road to Becoming a Goddess

In 1972, 21-year-old Lena appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine as "Miss November".

She was wearing a feathered sun hat, stockings, ankle boots and a pink scarf, but no other clothes.

Half a year later, Alexander Sawchuk, an assistant professor at the Institute of Signal and Image Processing at the University of Southern California, was looking for a picture to test the latest image compression algorithm.

He was annoyed by the boring test pictures he usually used, so this time they wanted to find a picture that would make people's eyes light up.

Just then, someone walked into the office with the issue of Playboy that had Lena in it...

Lena's photo, with its complex colors and textures, is a perfect test image.

They ripped the photo out, scanned it through a set of analog-to-digital converters, saved the result to an HP 2100 computer, and cropped a 512x512 image from it.

After doing all this, the research team was very satisfied with their results. Every time someone came to visit the laboratory, they would give them an image of Lena.

Soon, the image of the young model with bare shoulders became an industry standard, copied and reanalyzed billions of times by engineers.

The engineers who deal with Lena every day also have more ideas: some people write poems for her, some people add artistic effects to her pictures, and some people give her a Renaissance nickname: The Lenna.

Some people even used this picture as the cover of their doctoral thesis.

This image also appeared in the movie Sleeper, which was released in 1973. The protagonist wakes up in 2173 and is asked to identify photos from the past. The people in these photos are Stalin, Charles de Gaulle and Lena.

Although Lena's image has largely only appeared in media studies courses and engineering forums, it has become widely recognized as an indelible part of Internet history.

Provoking controversy

While Lena has become an industry standard, controversy has also arisen.

The biggest problem is that the photo is from Playboy, and some people think that using a Playboy photo is inappropriate.

At the same time, Playboy was also unhappy and said it would sue those who used the photos without authorization. But as the magazine sales gradually increased, Playboy rarely mentioned the lawsuit. This issue of the magazine sold more than 7 million copies.

More debate has focused on the alleged sexism of this photo, with many people believing that it caters to the male-dominated position in computer science.

Another female senior high school student wrote an article saying that the photo triggered sexual comments from boys in the class.

In 2018, Nature's subsidiary journal announced that they would no longer accept papers using Lena images.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Lena herself expressed shock that she could have been involved in harming or assaulting young women.

She said that the photos didn't show much and it was hard to tell what the big deal was unless they saw the full photo.

Lena's Life

After graduating from high school, Lena moved to the United States to work as a nanny for her relatives. She originally only wanted to stay in the United States for one year, but she didn't expect to stay for eight years.

In 1971, she was living in Chicago, newly married and struggling to make ends meet when her husband encouraged her to sign with a local modeling agency.

However, Lena, who is 1.67 meters tall, did not meet the standard for being a clothing model, but she had the opportunity to be a jewelry model. After working as a jewelry model for a while, she got in touch with Playboy.

Playboy wanted Lena to shoot its cover, and Lena recalled that she was introduced to a photographer named Dwight Hooker.

The photographer asked her if she was interested in taking some Playboy-style photos. Lena didn't understand what that meant at the time, but her husband thought it would be cool and well paid to take photos for Playboy, and they were short of money at the time.

By the time her photos were published, Lena already had a green card, was divorced and had a new boyfriend.

At that time, Playboy invited her to visit the mansion of founder Hugh Hefner in Beverly Hills, but Lena refused and chose to move to Rochester, New York with her boyfriend to become a model for Kodak and shoot calibration samples. This job only required working from 8 am to 4 pm, and she could also work as a bartender at the Marriott Hotel at night.

△ Lena photographed the product brochure covers for Kodak and Xerox

Later, Lena ended her American modeling career, returned to Sweden, married again, had three children, and worked in Sweden's alcohol monopoly state-owned enterprise and a government agency near Stockholm.

This photo became a part of her life, and Lena did not develop a deeper connection with the field of computer image processing.

Many years later, this photo has become a research material for computer science. In May 1997, Lena attended the 50th Annual Image Science and Technology Conference held in Boston and met scholars who used her photos for image research.

Today, Lena has children and grandchildren. Although the photo taken when she was young disturbed her life and someone once told her "I know every freckle on your face", she is still proud of it and considers it an important achievement in her life.

At least this photo has indeed made a significant contribution to the scientific and technological community.

△ Lena re-photographed the photos of that year

Coincidentally, Lena's son also works in the technology industry and deals with images every day.

He occasionally explains to his mother how the image was used. "Even though I don't understand it, I feel like I did something good," Lena said.

The Lena image is of low resolution by today's standards and, given advances in computer technology, may no longer be suitable as a paradigm for future image processing.

Maybe one day it will be abandoned by computer graphics, but it is undeniable that it once made a great contribution.

Finally, reply to Lena in the background of the official account to get Lena’s complete photo of that year (censored).

Reference sources:
https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of-jpegs/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html