Lena- playboy centerfold(general audiences) - her - 'lena '(Swedish) or 'lenna' Soderberg is a digitized Playboy centerfold, from November 1972. Legend as it that Alexander Sawchuk,an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a conference paper and found most images being used since the 60s too dull (they needed glossy image(human face) to ensure good output dynamic range). The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold of playboy (someone waked in with) and wrapped it around their wirephoto scannerconnected to a ADC & a minicomputer. They needed a 512X512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders. This picture has now been used worldwide for courses research and projects involving image processing. Not that long a journey from playboy centerfold to Image processing textbooks:) the full picture can be found www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/