The most used image in the history of computer science was never meant to be an image at all. It was a signal. And that signal taught us how to build the visual web.
The engineers were tired of the standard test images—stock photos of mandrills and peppers. According to lore, a graduate student named William Pratt walked in with a copy of the November 1972 issue of Playboy he had just bought. They tore out the centerfold, wrapped it around the drum scanner, and digitized a 5.12 x 5.12 cm crop of Lena Forsén’s face and hat. webmodels lena
"Lena is actually a bad test image. It’s over-smoothed, has limited dynamic range, and its popularity leads to overfitting. Natural images (BSDS500, ImageNet) are superior." The most used image in the history of