lenna

The Internet’s first poster girl, a standard test load used in the image processing community. The image was originally cropped from the November 1972 issue of Playboy Magazine, which anglicized the model’s name with a double n. It has interesting properties — complex feathers, shadows, smooth (but not flat) surfaces — that are pertinent in demonstrating various processing algorithms for image compression, filtering, dithering, texture mapping, image recognition, and so on. After a quarter century of remaining completely unaware that she had become an icon, a gray-haired but still winsome Lenna finally met her fans at a computer graphics conference in 1997. There is a fan page at www.lenna.org, with more details. Compare Utah teapot, the and Stanford Bunny