Lena the playboy image test « Charmi's Blog

Lenna or Lena is the name given to a standard test image originally cropped from a Playboy magazine centerfold picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model who posed naked for the November 1972 issue. The image is probably the most widely used test image for all sorts of image processing algorithms (such as compression and denoising) and related scientific publications. The anglicised version Lenna of Söderberg's name comes from the Playboy article; Playboy changed the original Lena so English-speaking readers would pronounce her name correctly.

David C. Munson, editor-in-chief, January 1996 IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, cited two reasons for the popularity of the image in research: First, the 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! Second, the Lena image is a picture of an attractive woman. It is not surprising that the (mostly male) image processing research community gravitated toward an image that they found attractive.

Source [wikipedia]