How a ‘Playboy’ Centerfold Helped Create the JPEG
The Lena test image. The original is a 512 by 512 pixel square. Photo: Dwight Hooker, 1972In her new book, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History, Samantha Cole traces the twisting history of the “Lena Centerfold,” an image from Playboy that became an international standard for training computers to recognize images. The image, taken in 1972, persisted for decades in computer science, even inspiring op-eds in 2015 from engineering students. The image and its ubiquity came to…