Lenna

[1] It is a picture of the Swedish model Lena Forsén, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker and cropped from the centerfold of the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine.

The image has attracted controversy in recent years because of its subject matter,[2] and many journals have deemed it inappropriate and discouraged its use, while others have banned it from publication outright.

Its history was described in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, in an article by Jamie Hutchinson:[10] Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper.

They got tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s.

The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer.

[11] In a 1999 issue of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing "Lena" was used in three separate articles,[15] and the picture continued to appear in scientific journals throughout the beginning of the 21st century.

"[18] While Playboy often cracks down on illegal uses of its material and did initially send a notice to the publisher of Optical Engineering about its unauthorized use in that publication,[12] over time it has decided to overlook the wide use of Lena.

[15]A 2012 paper on compressed sensing used a photo of the model Fabio Lanzoni as a test image to draw attention to this issue.