In 1972, a Swedish model posed nude for ‘Playboy’. Years later, we have the JPEG format thanks to this
The one of Lena Sjööblom It is one of the most delirious races in the history of technology. To begin with, because when she made her mark in the sector she was not an engineer, nor a mathematician, nor a physicist, nor anything that resembled her in the slightest. Nor did it have any known “Eureka” moment nor did it contribute any discovery or invention. No. Sjööblom was a model. From a model she became what was then known as a “Playboy girl.” And from the pages of the nude magazine he jumped to the front-line research that today, half a century later, allows us to enjoy the JPEG image format. Let’s go in parts. In the early 70s, Sjööblom, a 21-year-old Swedish immigrant Recently landed in the US, she made a living as a model. To make her way and probably without the slightest idea of the journey her image would end up taking, at the end of 1972 she agreed to pose nude for Playboya magazine that at that time sold millions of copies around the world. In one of the central photos that he took of him Dwight Hookerone of the most famous portrait painters of the city, appears from behind, in front of a mirror, with no clothes other than a hat, a red boa, stockings and heels. I liked his work. A lot. At least that’s what we can deduce if we take into account that the November 1972 issue, in which Sjööblom was the playmate main feature and Pamela Rawlings was on the cover, sold 7.16 million copiesmaking it the most successful in the magazine’s entire history. The pose became so famous that in 1973 Woody Allen He even snuck it into one of his movies. As often happens with fame, that sudden public interest came, swept away and, with it, evaporated. Sjööblom continued her modeling career and, once retired, returned to Sweden. Chances of life, one of those 7.16 million copies of the 1972 magazine ended up in the hands of a person linked to the Signal Image Processing Institute (SIPI) of the University of South Carolinaa laboratory in which, at that time, they worked on image processing and were laying the foundations of what would end up being the JPEG and MPEG standards. The coincidence would not be of greater interest if it were not for the fact that that reader took his Playboy to SIPI at the right time: just when They were looking for an image for their tests. The right place, at the right time Today it may seem crazy for someone to show up at the office with a nude magazine under their arm. Not in the 70s. As Lorena Fernández remembersof the University of Deustoin The Conversationnot only was it common for the staff to show themselves with their Playboy in teams that, like Carolina’s, were made up solely of men. It was even well seen, just like doing it today with The Times or the guide with the programming of La 2 documentaries. In that context, the arrival of Sjööblom’s photos was as well received as it was proverbial. Around June or July 1973, electrical engineering professor Alexander Swachuk, one of his graduate students, and the manager of SIPI were madly looking for a photo that they could scan and include in one of their presentations on image compression. They had their own stock, of course, but it was made up of files inherited from the boring and trite television standards of the early ’60s. The Swachuk Team I wanted a human face and an image that was also bright to guarantee a good output dynamic range. And what better option —they thought— that Sjööblom’s face? Skipping all the rules on property rights and decorum, the researchers used the image of Playboy. They kept only the top third of the magazine’s central poster and placed it under their muirhead scannerequipped with analog-digital converters and a minicomputer Hewlett Packard 2100. Jamie Hutchinson details To stay with a section of 512×512 pixels, they scanned 5.12 inches of the top of the photo, which in practice showed only Lena Sjööblom’s face, her shoulders and part of her bare back. The result showed a software error that forced the team to retouch it, but Swachuk’s team was working against the clock and decided to keep the distorted and altered image. The fact is that he liked it. Just as I had liked Sjööblom’s photo shoot in Playboy at the end of ’72. “They asked us for copies and we gave them to them so they could compare their image algorithms with ours on the same test image,” the professor himself recalled some time later. The final process At the SIPI they turned Sjööblom’s portrait into a test image for digital compression and transmission work. Arpanetthe precursor of the Internet. And that, with the passage of time, had an unpredictable result: the image of that model that everyone began to refer to as “Lena” or “Lenna” and whose origin began to blur became the standard used by other researchers who wanted to compress similar files with their algorithms. The face of that twenty-year-old Swedish woman, with a hat and a bare back, was replicated in books, conferences, articles, traveled through the “Atapuerca” of the Internet and helped lay the foundations for the JPEG image format. “Many researchers know the Lena image so well that they can easily evaluate any algorithm that runs on it. That’s why most people in the industry seem to believe that Lena has served well as a standard,” comments Hutchinson. In addition to being a “familiar image”, the photo combines shadows, highlights and blurred and sharp areas and details, a mixture that makes it “a tough test for an algorithm processing”. Perhaps the most curious thing about the entire story is that so much Playboy Like Lena Sjööblom herself, they spent decades without knowing the exorbitant fame—and the important role—of the 70s portrait. The first to … Read more
