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Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

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Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#3
> The small army of women who had worked as so-called computers during the first half of the 20th century were leaving the tech industry in droves, as computing went from being perceived as a form of menial labor to a more cerebral, masculine pursuit.

Isn't this rather misleading? Obviously there were women in early computing who were very influential. But weren't the "human computers" in fact performing tedious and repetitive calculations, and not merely "perceived" as such?

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#4
post #2

Did she actually still have the same hat and scarf? I didn't notice that mentioned in the text.

The new one looks slightly different: it has a different texture on the underside of the brim. It’s likely that the original hat belonged to Playboy.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#5
Oh that is fun, I was one of the operators at the USC Image Processing Institute who did scanning, ran the systems (initially a the HP2100, then a PDP 11/40, and later a PDP 11/55t. We did lots of tours and we had a number of graduate students working on various issues. One of the things we did was to provide the 512 x 512 set of reference images on 1600BPI magnetic tape to researchers. Each image was stored as a red image, green image, and blue image (8 bits per pixel for 24 bits total). In addition to Lena there were other standard images that involved repeating texture, lots of lines and edges, and variable frequency details. By using the standard images, two algorithms could be compared using their output on the same standard image. This helped researchers in the field compare their work with other published studies.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#6
post #5

Oh that is fun, I was one of the operators at the USC Image Processing Institute who did scanning, ran the systems (initially a the HP2100, then a PDP 11/40, and later a PDP 11/55t. We did lots of tours and we had a number of graduate students working on various issues. One of the things we did was to provide the 512 x 512 set of reference images on 1600BPI magnetic tape to researchers. Each image was stored as a red…

The images (well, most of them) are online: http://sipi.usc.edu/database/

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#7

> The small army of women who had worked as so-called computers during the first half of the 20th century were leaving the tech industry in droves, as computing went from being perceived as a form of menial labor to a more cerebral, masculine pursuit. Isn't this rather misleading? Obviously there were women in early computing who were very influential. But weren't the "human computers" in fact performing tedious and…

No, it's not misleading. The change was in perception, not in the nature of the task. Yes, there were women who did rote calculations, but those weren't the roles influential to how the role evolved.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#8
post #5

Oh that is fun, I was one of the operators at the USC Image Processing Institute who did scanning, ran the systems (initially a the HP2100, then a PDP 11/40, and later a PDP 11/55t. We did lots of tours and we had a number of graduate students working on various issues. One of the things we did was to provide the 512 x 512 set of reference images on 1600BPI magnetic tape to researchers. Each image was stored as a red…

The images (well, most of them) are online: http://sipi.usc.edu/database/

> Please note that we no longer distribute the following images that were previously available in our database: 4.2.04 (lena), 4.2.02 (tiffany), elaine.512, numbers.512 and testpat.1k. Although these images have played a significant role in the history of image processing, they no longer represent the best examples for future research.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The images (well, most of them) are online: http://sipi.usc.edu/database/

> Please note that we no longer distribute the following images that were previously available in our database: 4.2.04 (lena), 4.2.02 (tiffany), elaine.512, numbers.512 and testpat.1k. Although these images have played a significant role in the history of image processing, they no longer represent the best examples for future research.

Hallelujah.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The images (well, most of them) are online: http://sipi.usc.edu/database/

> Please note that we no longer distribute the following images that were previously available in our database: 4.2.04 (lena), 4.2.02 (tiffany), elaine.512, numbers.512 and testpat.1k. Although these images have played a significant role in the history of image processing, they no longer represent the best examples for future research.

Yup, that’s what I was referring to. Kind of disappointing that they’ve taken down Lena :(
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