I don’t have a problem with the usage of the image on moral or social grounds, but I don’t think that it’s the best choice to use.
In the past, Playboy has been fine with its use. I see no reason to believe that that will change. However, the image is not in the public domain: Playboy just decided to ignore infringement on goodwill grounds. I think that it’d probably be better to use an image that avoids the whole issue.
Lenna asked that it stop being used recently. I don’t believe that she has legal ownership of the image, but point is that use of the thing basically existed on goodwill grounds, and I don’t think that changing that is a good idea. No reason to hurt someone’s feelings when there are plenty of other options.
While it may have good characteristics as photographs go, I seriously doubt that it’s the best option out there; it wasn’t as if it was selected after some extensive search.
The test image is not terribly high resolution, at 512x512. While maybe that was fine for computers in the 1970s when it was chosen, it’s not a whole lot of data.
The image is a scan, has artifacts from the printing and scanning process. While arguably it could be useful to measure how scanned images work, I think that most images today are not scanned, but are direct-to-digital, and are probably more-useful.
While I don’t think that it’s generally an issue in the West, some countries — think the theocracy in Iran — do take issue with bare shoulders, and it’s just liable to create unnecessary problems for any people working on image compression there. Unless there’s a good reason not to do so, might as well take a least-common denominator image.
I think that the story is cute, and it’s nice that Playboy decided to let people use it, but it’s not as if the people who chose it were trying to choose a test image for the world.
I think that the only case where it really makes sense to use the thing today would be to compare compression against some compression algorithm for which access to the algorithm no longer exists, but Lena compression test results exist, which seems unlikely to be much more than a niche case.
I don’t have a problem with the usage of the image on moral or social grounds, but I don’t think that it’s the best choice to use.
In the past, Playboy has been fine with its use. I see no reason to believe that that will change. However, the image is not in the public domain: Playboy just decided to ignore infringement on goodwill grounds. I think that it’d probably be better to use an image that avoids the whole issue.
Lenna asked that it stop being used recently. I don’t believe that she has legal ownership of the image, but point is that use of the thing basically existed on goodwill grounds, and I don’t think that changing that is a good idea. No reason to hurt someone’s feelings when there are plenty of other options.
While it may have good characteristics as photographs go, I seriously doubt that it’s the best option out there; it wasn’t as if it was selected after some extensive search.
The test image is not terribly high resolution, at 512x512. While maybe that was fine for computers in the 1970s when it was chosen, it’s not a whole lot of data.
The image is a scan, has artifacts from the printing and scanning process. While arguably it could be useful to measure how scanned images work, I think that most images today are not scanned, but are direct-to-digital, and are probably more-useful.
While I don’t think that it’s generally an issue in the West, some countries — think the theocracy in Iran — do take issue with bare shoulders, and it’s just liable to create unnecessary problems for any people working on image compression there. Unless there’s a good reason not to do so, might as well take a least-common denominator image.
I think that the story is cute, and it’s nice that Playboy decided to let people use it, but it’s not as if the people who chose it were trying to choose a test image for the world.
I think that the only case where it really makes sense to use the thing today would be to compare compression against some compression algorithm for which access to the algorithm no longer exists, but Lena compression test results exist, which seems unlikely to be much more than a niche case.