I appreciate the historical tradition of using the photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg as a test image, but it's time to move on. It's fun for us hetero males, but like it or not, this sends a message to young women that they aren't welcome in this field. I wish Fabrice Bellard would have left them out of the demo set.
Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see a demo in the browser without built-in support, but leave it to the man who put Linux in the browser to write a decoder in javascript. This is an encouraging project.
> I appreciate the historical tradition of using the photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg as a test image, but it's time to move on. It's fun for us hetero males, but like it or not, this sends a message to young women that they aren't welcome in this field.
I find your comment a bit strange. I am an heterosexual male and I find this picture utterly uninteresting from a sexual point of view. To me, the appeal of using this pictures is sheer seventies nostalgia... I'm too young to have been alive in 1973 but I'm old enough to remember gawking in awe at the wall of the computer room adorned with output from the first desktop color printer I ever heard of or the first laser printer I ever saw. The example picture used was Lena. The picture reminds me of old computer rooms... I don't even know who the model is and I don't even find her pretty.
By all means use a better picture... But when a Hello World moment is required on a printer, this one is a very strong contender.
It's actually a very good point when you take into consideration the origin of the image. From [1]: “Lena Söderberg […] appeared as a Playmate in the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine” and it is referring to this particular photo. Article in cyrilic (Russian?) [2] shows what the uncropped version look like. Putting things in context is important.
No, it's not. Because people do not use the second image, nobody sees it until you linked, and it cant "send a message to young women that they aren't welcome in this field".
All this is incredibly unimportant. You just made me waste 60 seconds of my life on a pointless thing and i want them back.
I think people that pretend to be offended by things like this, unwittingly infantilizing the people that they are trying to support, do far more to discourage minorities from tech than pictures of women's faces.
You're assuming that ANTSANTS is generalizing from zero. Since he's linked to one example of one individual that is mature enough to realize that the importance of that common bitmap isn't its origin but what concepts and ideas in the field of image compression those set of pixels have been used to demonstrate, and how those ideas relate to machine learning. Pointers Gone Wild is a great blog, with great technical content, written by someone that is actually accomplishing something because they are fully focused on what actually matters instead of the accidental origin of those pixels.
ANTSANTS' anecdotal evidence serves as a counterpoint to your anecdotal evidence, but you know what they say, the plural of anecdotes is not data. Instead you may want to work from a statistically significant sample size when making your point. If not, don't be surprised when people discount any conclusions you have made based on anecdotes.
> You're assuming that ANTSANTS is generalizing from zero.
No, I'm not. I'm asking: "I'm curious if you're basing this belief on actual information from the people in question, or just your intuition about what they probably think." If he's got statistically stronger evidence than my anecdotes (which are more than two, but yes, still anecdotes), I'd love to hear it! If not, I'm curious what other evidence or argument he has for the claim he made.
Not everything is about gender, sexism, feminism, or chauvinism. There are very few things in the world that are not somehow associated with male vs. female in an objectively equal way. The Lena in question is just an image with a long tradition. Anyone can find and use a male image for his/her own image compression tests if s/he wants to. It's not a statement to use Lena instead.
True, but you still need to balance the relative merits of continuing versus discontinuing the tradition. There is a very real loss from discontinuing the tradition in question without first augmenting references for many of the algorithms that use Lena with other standard reference images. That's a real and immediate loss.
Try a different strategy: offer a better alternative that makes it so practitioners not only don't notices the loss of Lena in common usage, but instead overwhelmingly favor alternatives. Create a better product.
Real comparisons of algorithms do not operate on a single image, but large suites of images, where the results are computed as averages. Changing the dataset by removing one image is unlikely to be a "very real loss."
Alternatives exist, and AFAIK Lena is just used as a "canonical" example to use as a nice picture (like the Zachary Karate Club network).
People are too sensitive. I'm a hetero male, and I don't find the image 'fun' at all... it's just an image. It doesn't send a message to anyone. If anything, I don't really care for it for image algorithm tests because the palette is fairly flat.
No matter how you feel about the image itself, though, there is value in continuing to use it... people are familiar with it, to the point of it becoming almost cliché. This takes the focus off of the image and subject and puts it squarely on the image algorithm.
The smallish downside of continuing with it may outweigh the very small upside. The image by itself might not be a big deal, but we're trying to disrupt the pattern of women being used only as objects, not perpetuate it.
If we used a male model as a photographic test subject here, is that not the sexist objectification of males? Should we use an unattractive person or an animal instead? Are you going to attack the very notion of beauty or the fact that women are the "fairer sex"?
Sure, it could be objectification. It's pretty cut and dried in this case since the image was scanned from a magazine almost at random. The woman had no agency in the decision at all.
Of course I'm going to attack that. Women are required to be beautiful or they are deemed worthless, or failures. So they put a lot of work into it from a fear of failure. Men can be beautiful too, especially to a woman's eye which you've never seen through. If men were made to worry about their appearance as much as women, we'd be "fair" too.
There are predominant gender roles. How can we determine if the predominance is wrong, or just natural? All of this assumes the predominance is wrong. If I go to enjoy a burlesque show (a largely female-dominated event that all consensually participate in), did I merely experience the predominance, or did I also reinforce it? If the majority like something even though a minority do not, does that mean the majority are somehow wrong?
No, the upside of continuing to use it is to show the politically correct bullies that we aren't afraid, and you aren't going to get everything you want.
There is nothing inconsiderate about using the cropped image "Lena". Nothing. It is not an offensive image. Only hypersensitive people who choose to be offended by everything find it offensive, and those people should be fought against, not placated.
Look, you're under no real obligation to stop being an inconsiderate asshole. I'm just pointing out that there are practical consequences.
You don't have to be offended by the image. You don't even have to understand why people are offended, that's fine. But if you don't take other people's feelings into consideration, that's the inconsiderate part.
Other people are going to have different opinions than you do. Telling other people they're not allowed to be offended is why you're an asshole.
I would be an inconsiderate asshole if the picture was actually offensive, ie, if it was goatse, someone in blackface, etc. But it isn't, and unlike you, I have the courage to make a statement about the image: that it is objectively not offensive. There is no one out there who is actually offended by it. They are all people pushing an agenda.
So your argument seems to be that because some people could be offended by it, we shouldn't use it, even though the notion that anyone could be offended by it is ridiculous on its face. So what, then, about things like gay pride parades? People can be offended by those, too. According to your argument, we should end that, too. But I'm sure you'd never advocate for that. You'd say something like "it's their right to be in your face in public". And of course it is, even though it can offend people. But that same argument defends people who'd use offensive images in image processing papers, not just ones which are just a target for politically correct assholes. You only care about people being offended if they're on your side.
Gay pride parades are not bad things, and just the same, a woman posing for Playboy is not a bad thing, and using the cropped image of the face of a woman's nude picture is even less offensive than a gay pride parade. And nobody should be pressuring anyone to stop either of those things.
I'm just saying that anyone who IS offended by it is a whiny, oversensitive asshole who wants to force the world to accommodate them, and that is wrong. Standing up to them does not make me the asshole: babying them makes you the asshole.
Edit: just take another look at the cropped picture "Lena". If your argument is that that is somehow offensive, you are wrong, plain and simple.
You can't understand the meaning of a symbol by studying the symbol. You have to go look at what it means. It's like analyzing a swastika and deciding that neo-nazis aren't offensive. The problem is that only men were part of that project, they treated a woman in an exclusive manner, and now that image is a reminder of that sexist hierarchy.
That's the exact privilege you get to enjoy as a hetero male. You get to ignore things like this when your female colleagues (if you're lucky enough to work with any) have to look at the image and be reminded that many people continue to view them as objects.
Not sure if you're trolling, but I have a spare minute...
- If I post a picture of a cute kitten, does it mean I look at a cat as an object? That I will only under-appreciate all animals because I liked a photo of one?
- If I post a picture of my mother or father, am I objectifying them?
- What if I take a picture of a street performer who's doing some awesome thing and post it... am I reducing them to simply an object of attraction?
I just said it didn't affect me one way or another... that it is just an image. If someone thinks this image means I view a woman as an object, they are projecting THEIR OWN ISSUES onto me. That is the ONLY way that it could be offensive, in that they are choosing to be offended by something that 99% of the population think nothing about.
This isn't just about having a picture. I'm not sure how you got that impression. It's about the context where it comes from and the repeated use of the picture in a scientific context.
If you have a picture of your parents on your desk, that's great and I respect your love for your family. If you keep using a crop of your mother from her Playboy centerfold in the '70s as a test case for your algorithms, and you encourage other scientists to use the same picture, I might be a bit weirded out.
If you keep using a crop of your mother from her Playboy centerfold in the '70s as a test case for your algorithms, and you encourage other scientists to use the same picture, I might be a bit weirded out.
>If you keep using a crop of your mother from her Playboy centerfold in the '70s as a test case for your algorithms, and you encourage other scientists to use the same picture, I might be a bit weirded out.
And who wouldn't be! But that begs the question, is there a son or daughter of Lena Soderberg who is also a researcher or software engineer working in image compression algorithms?
Sure. This picture was painted by Dali, inspired by a Scientific American article about the minimum number of pixels needed to recognize an image. He was making an artistic statement that has a direct connection to Fourier analysis (and if you read the context article that image came from you might know this). This is a painting whose context is "fine art" (i.e. you can have tasteful nudity). That is a different context from pornography, whose purpose is sexual.
You clearly do not understand how the context of an image matters in interpreting it.
>This picture was painted by Dali, inspired by a Scientific American article about the minimum number of pixels needed to recognize an image. He was making an artistic statement that has a direct connection to Fourier analysis
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah... The Lena image contains a nice mixture of detail, flat regions, shading, and texture that do a good job of testing various image processing algorithms. It is a good test image. It is used by thousands of researchers in the field since image processing was a field.
So, your image isn't "sexualization" because Dali and "fine art" ?
>You clearly do not understand how the context of an image matters in interpreting it.
You cannot articulate a difference between Lena and the Dali that doesn't rely upon subjective opinion.
> So, your image isn't "sexualization" because Dali and "fine art" ?
Yes, there is such a thing as tasteful nudity, and pornography is generally not. This is why our society allows children into art museums but not strip clubs. What is so hard to understand about this? Context is subjective, but there are agreed-upon standards for professionalism. Just because the standard was different fifty years ago does not make it a good idea today. If you can't think of any "traditions" from fifty years ago that professional scientists unanimously agree are wrong today, then you're quite ignorant.
> Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...
Clearly I am the one failing to articulate things.
Why? It's the picture and not the context. If it wasn't posted here on HN, it wouldn't have seen it.
>If you have a picture of your parents on your desk, that's great and I respect your love for your family. If you keep using a crop of your mother from her Playboy centerfold in the '70s as a test case for your algorithms, and you encourage other scientists to use the same picture, I might be a bit weirded out.
Do you know on how many portrait photos of your co-workers they wear pants? Do you think it is important they do? Also get weirded out, that's your problem. Do you know how many people get weirded out of you because you browse HN?
Why don't you find a set of great test images (under suitable licence) then run those through the wide variety of image formats at different settings, and host it all on a website? (Put a few ads on it and you have nearly passive income, if the hosting isn't too much)
Did you read the article? There were _several_ great test images used in the Mozilla study under suitable licenses, and Bellard did test with some of those. The Lena picture here wasn't particularly scientifically useful, it was presumably just used out of a sense of tradition. (Mozilla didn't use it.)
If it matters so much to you, take that image set and do exactly as DanBC suggested.
Create a site with all the different image formats out there with a larger test set.
Be willing to take matters into your own hands and change the norms and traditions in that field of study. The best way to accomplish that is by offering something better. I would say that a wiki with many test images for many algorithms is something better. If you do an good job, people will adopt your approach and tradition will change. Complaining on HN isn't going to change tradition.
Introducing new ideas usually is usually more successful long-term approach than "book burning" because you disagree with the content.
What do you know, there are other attractive women in those photosets, including at least one that appears to be wearing roughly as little as Lena. It's almost like our brains are wired for facial recognition and thus attractive faces are good test subjects for image compression algorithms or something.
Sounds like we agree, then -- there are enough other images with all the properties of the Lena image that make it useful for image-compression tests that there wasn't a scientific reason to use the Lena one in this analysis.
But none of those other images have been used as widely for as long to provide the same utility for comparison.
Getting the equivalent for all other papers involves getting the source code for all the other papers, and running those algorithms against these other images and making those images easily discoverable by someone who might come across these other papers (they are unlikely to contain links to your newly generated set).
What you're essentially advocating is reducing the available comparative evidence in an entire field of study because some people object to its origin, many of which don't even work in this field of study.
I'm sorry, but when you can't even admit that eliminating this image from use might have negative consequences from a utility point of view, it makes it very hard for others to accept your position.
Losing a common point of comparison in a field of study working on optimization problems is a step back. If you advocate for "diluting" the image by getting other reference images in common use by practitioners, then I can back that up. That approach actually balances the concerns of both sides and generally enriches the field (more common reference images can only serve to aid in objective and subjective comparison)
The fact that you call the uncropped image "pornographic" (which, yes, it technically is) when Playboy centerfolds are rather tame by modern standards kinda hints at the real problem here: the boring old American prudishness that has been masquerading as feminism as of late. I sincerely could not care less if Bellard had used Billy Herrington's toned ass as a test subject. The sooner that our society can get past this ridiculous fear of sexuality and the human body, the better.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Bellard is from France, a culture much more accepting of nudity and sexuality than ours. I would not be surprised if he had simply not considered the possibility of prudes across the pond getting outraged over such an innocuous thing.
Now show me a picture of a man from that dataset that could possibly be construed as sexual.
This is not a matter of prudishness. I would be totally fine (see my other comment in this thread) if researchers used both male and female crops, but they don't. So to make your point you need to show me all of the male French researchers who are accepting of male nudity in their image processing research. I would be very surprised if you could find me a single one.
>Now show me a picture of a man from that dataset that could possibly be construed as sexual.
>This is not a matter of prudishness.
There seems to be a contradiction here.
>I would be very surprised if you could find me a single one.
I agree, not because I think male French researchers would give a rat's ass about the cropped head of a naked guy appearing as a test subject, but because I doubt any would be foolish enough to poke the proverbial hornet's nest and incur the wrath of self-righteous west coast white guys tweeting on their iPhones.
You're missing the point, which is that it's not the specific image, but that testbeds use suggestive photos of attractive women and not men. You want people to feel free to use nudity or suggestiveness. Fine. I want them to be equal about which suggestive photos they use. As in not all women.
And now you're saying that French researchers don't care, but they do because they don't want to anger Americans? (And somehow they're all white, live on the west coast, and have iPhones?) What a crazy web you're weaving.
>This is not a matter of prudishness. I would be totally fine (see my other comment in this thread)
You mean this one? "Sexualizing women has nothing to do with image processing research." How positively libertine of you.
>You're missing the point
And you're missing my point, which is that if you really weren't a prude, you wouldn't care either way. Straight men like pretty women, straight women like handsome men, gay men like handsome men, gay women like pretty women, some people like some combination of the above, some guys 40 years ago liked a pretty woman, who gives a fuck? Stop being offended by extremely tame displays of sexuality.
>And now you're saying that French researchers don't care, but they do because they don't want to anger Americans?
You city slickers don't seem very good with jokes, do you?
I'd tell you to "lighten up" but I forgot that's code for "long live the patriarchy."
I open a men's magazine and see photographs of women.
I open a women's magazine and see photographs of... women.
These magazines exist because people are buying them. WOMEN are buying them. I don't see many men on the editorial boards of these womens' magazines, pushing for more attractive women in the magazine in ever-more-scantily-clad garb.
What do I conclude, other than that a lot more attention seems to be being "naturally" paid to women in general, especially in a superficial context?
What do I make of the fact that more than double the number of women are bisexual, than males are? And thus, a significantly higher percentage of people of all sexes find the female form interesting?
Women: The cause of, and solution to, all the world's sexism
You are either subtly trolling, or have an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance going on here. You both objectify her by using those adjectives ("beautiful, young") AND THEN go on to state that use of a female model is sexist. Is use of a well-dressed male model sexist? If not, then your entire PREMISE is, in fact, sexist! Not to mention this photo is ENTIRELY asexual. Are you suggesting we avoid use of human models entirely to dodge sexism? Good luck with that.
90% of all photos posted on the internet contains a human face. Having a human face as a test picture makes perfect sense and this one has been used forever so it's a good benchmark that people can compare and relate to. It's not like she's totally naked or anything like that either.
What about introducing a new male equivalent image of Lena instead? This approach would at least balance things out while maintaining an image that has become a standard to compare things to for a long time.
If I were someone working on image compression techniques I would probably have seen many many algorithms and their output using that image so when I see a new algorithm and a new Lena, I might look at the results and think "Hey, this is similar to this other approach I am familiar with"
So many photos taken on any given day are photos of people, so it's simply not practical to eliminate a human subject from test images. If we're going to have an image of a human subject, that person is going to have to be somewhere on the gender spectrum. More data (images of two people) is preferable to no data (no images of people to avoid the risk of offending anyone)
There's a difference between using a picture of a human face because we've determined it's useful for the test at hand, and using a 1970s Playboy scan because that was the most convenient thing for early computer-graphics researchers in the 1970s.
In particular, the (appropriately-licensed) Kodak image set used in the Mozilla study includes multiple pictures of women, none of which are Playboy scans. The complaint is not that there's a picture of a woman, it is that _this_ particular picture keeps being used despite no particular scientific reason why it's optimal for comparing graphics formats.
So the only real contention people have here is the source publication of the original image, right? Because AFAICT, the cropped image (as it's always been used in practice) is nor more or less offensive that kodim04.png from the kodak set.
Furthermore, why does the licensing matter? Near as I can tell every use of Lena, except for by a for-profit company, constitutes fair use. The image, every time I've seen it, has been used for non-profit educational work. It's never reproduced in its entirety. The use of the image for this image compression purposes has no impact on the original market for which the image was originally created. Does this not meet the requirements of fair use?
That all said, I agree that if their is a better images available for this purposes, those should be used as well, but that is an entirely separate issue from whether or not Lena should or should not be used. The happenstance provenance of the image is really the only controversial detail, and if we go back to the history of why it was used it was mere chance:
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. They wanted something glossy to ensure good
output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just
then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of
Playboy.[0]
Put yourself back in 1973. Imagine all the different sources of high quality glossy images of a human face with high dynamic range you might have easy access to 41 years ago. I have a hard time thinking of content that would have been available at that time that would have rivaled Playboy. I have no qualms with people judging things from today in todays terms, but presentism [1] tends to rub me the wrong way. If you want to judge something, don't do so anachronistically.
Anyways, I want to re-iterate my main point, which you did not address:
If I were someone working on image compression techniques I
would probably have seen many many algorithms and their output
using that image so when I see a new algorithm and a new Lena,
I might look at the results and think "Hey, this is similar to
this other approach I am familiar with"
There is value in consistency/continuity. Starting to use the image of Fabio Lanzoni like Deanna Needell and Rachel Ward did is a "lossless" approach of dealing with the controversial provenance of Lena.
I find the argument that there would be a lack of high-quality images in 1973 utterly unconvincing. Life magazine or national geographic could have been used. It was just a historical accident, and contrary to what you claim, I do not believe there is a pressing reason to keep using the exact same image, it's merely a relatively unquestioned tradition.
Almost none of the images from life magazine are studio images. The quality of the images vary greatly depending on the equipment used by the photo-journalist (often viewfinder Leicas not large format Hasselblads).
National Geographic has been printed in a format that is approximately have the surface area as Playboy. From a cursory search of NG covers from 1973, the images aren't the same quality as those achievable with studio photography equipment available at the time.
> It was just a historical accident, and contrary to what you claim, I do not believe there is a pressing reason to keep using the exact same image, it's merely a relatively unquestioned tradition.
Many people (including myself) do not believe there is a pressing reason to not keep using the exact same image. I do think there is good reason to publish research with additional test images including the Kodak set linked to above. "Dilution" of the image would achieve the same goal some are advocating here.
Lastly, I find the following heuristic valuable:
function hasValidOpinion(person) {
return person.hasPublishedContentInField();
}
Near as I can tell from the profiles of people participating in this bikeshed, that function produces false for you, geofft, loudmax and myself. The truth is that none of our opinions are relevant here since this isn't our bikeshed to paint.
The easiest way to break from this tradition is to produce novel research in the area of image compression and publish papers without using this image as a reference. Feel free to publish a paper without it if this matters so much. In the meantime, it's not really fair to be out there criticizing those who are from the comfort of your armchair.
I'm not convinced that other magazines couldn't have provided an image of similar quality, your arguments are rather hand-wavy. The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority. I don't care to convince you that we should change the practice of using this picture, but I'm curious to know why you would think we should NOT change it, given that there happen to be people who believe that we should.
Find one. I've been through a fair amount of old periodicals from the 60s and 70s and I'm at a loss to think of something comparable. A copy of Vogue (est 1892) or W magazine (est. 1972) would probably have comparable images, but would probably not have been readily available at the time to the demographic doing this kind of research.
We should not change it for the reasons I made in several sibling comments: we lose a common point of comparison.
You can dilute it's relevance by providing many alternative reference images for many algorithms and popularized those alternative reference images. No one in the field is going to complain about having more common reference images, but they sure as heck are going to see you as "book burner" if you trying to eliminate the one common image without first providing alternatives. Merely stating there are other lossless images is not sufficient. You need to provide those same images after having been processed with every relevant algorithm someone might need to know.
How about you start off by doing this work for Bellard. Take the Mozilla set, run them through BGP and send the images to Bellard for inclusion on his website. Enrich us. Don't make us poorer.
> The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority.
The notion that someone uninvolved can have an opinion and expect others to shoulder the burden of conforming to that opinion is even more ridiculous.
>A 2012 paper on compressed sensing by Deanna Needell and Rachel Ward used a photo of the model Fabio Lanzoni as a test image to draw attention to this issue
Well, now that they have done it, straight males can "try on" what the oppression of Lena must feel like for women:
So everyone, please respond:
Now that there's an "attractive" man in use for image testing, do you feel repulsed or discouraged that they would sexualize/objectify a man like that?
Do you feel pushed away from this industry?
Personally, this exercise is helping me see the light of the "are we treating women as delicate flowers who can't handle it" viewpoint. That image of Fabio is not threatening to me. Anyone who tries to tell me it is threaten, I think is being overly sensitive.
I'm utterly comfortable with people expressing this level of sexuality in the academic/public area. It's more akin to a "schoolkid crush" than to strip tease.
I just stopped reading after I got to that image. Why, with all the photos you could possibly choose, use a sexually suggestive one? And one whose context is the kind of boys-club software engineering we should be doing everything to get away from. Sigh.
Also, looking at the other comments, the fact that you happen to be fine with that image is neither here nor there. It certainly doesn't cancel out the fact that I'm not.
I think everyone is forgetting the fact that the uncropped photograph is pornographic. So the rule should be "If you use Lena, use a similarly cropped picture of a nude male model."
People aren't forgetting. It's a disgusting "in" joke. The entire point of including it is because it's pornographic.
Disappointing, but unsurprising, to see HN defending the use of literal pornography in a professional setting. I thought we moved past the Ruby on Rails jerks defending porn in a professional setting as harmless fun.
Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see a demo in the browser without built-in support, but leave it to the man who put Linux in the browser to write a decoder in javascript. This is an encouraging project.