Lena
Digital image nerds will recognize this one.
I found it while looking through a bunch of old diskettes (yes I am that old). Pretty girl with dark hair, big eyes and a hint of a smile, trying out a boa and a hat. Used to be my Windows 3.1 background for a time. It is a cropping* of Lena Söderberg, Miss November 1972 in Playboy (this is what the centrefold looked like, in case you’re curious ;).
Believe it or not, it is one of the most, if not the most studied digital images in the world. Image processing researchers have been using it as a baseline image for decades. Numerous compression, resampling and colour timing systems have been tried out on Lena’s face over the years.
Supposedly USC researchers were getting bored with pictures of jellybeans and baboons so some dude’s copy of Playboy got used instead. That was around this time in 1973. For some reason it evolved into a de facto standard.
* I’m using the .png from Wikipedia because browsers don’t typically render .tiffs. Click on the picture and you’ll get an exact copy of what I have, right from the USC.
