The 'First Lady of the Internet'

Lenna or Lena
Lena Södeberg (Lenna Sjööblom)
Click on image, if you want more...

For the full picture click here. Better, click here for an unpublished image. [Lenna (que debería llamarse en realidad Lena) es un fragmento de fotografía de una playmate reproducida en el número de noviembre (miss noviembre) de 1972 de la revista Playboy. Sirve como imagen de prueba para los algoritmos de compresión de imagen y se ha convertido de facto en un estándar industrial y científico.] This scan, nonetheless, became one of the most used images in computer history, so much that the mysterious Lenna came to be dubbed the 'First Lady of the Internet'[2] and one of the influential photographs that changed the course of history [3] The image had a sense of affection to many image processing scientists that one of them even wrote a sonnet about her.[11] O dear Lena, your beauty is so vast It is hard sometimes to describe it fast. I thought the entire world I would impress If only your portrait I could compress. Alas! First when I tried to use VQ I found that your cheeks belong to only you. Your silky hair contains a thousand lines Hard to match with sums of discrete cosines. And for your lips, sensual and tactual Thirteen Crays found not the proper fractal. And while these setbacks are all quite severe I might have fixed them with hacks here or there But when filters took sparkle from your eyes I said, "Heck with it. I'll just digitize." Original scanned image (1973):

Here is a picture of Lenna taken in May 1997 at the IS&T's conference:

For the curious:
'lena' or 'lenna' is a digitized Playboy centerfold, from November 1972.
(Lenna is the spelling in Playboy, Lena is the Swedish spelling of the name.) Lena Soderberg (ne Sjööblom) was last reported living in her native Sweden, happily married with three kids and a job with the state liquor monopoly.
In 1988, she was interviewed by some Swedish computer related publication, and she was pleasantly amused by what had happened to her picture.
That was the first she knew of the use of that picture in the computer business.

• Lena Soderberg at Playboy.com
• A Complete Story of Lenna (with one new picture of her)
• The Lenna Story (contains a link to an un-cropped scan of the original Playboy photograph)