2 STRAIGHT CODE

In 1973, Alexander Sawchuk, the father of the JPEG image file format, was an electrical engineer working in the University of Southern California's Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI). Sawchuk was looking for the perfect image to scan to optimize the new image compression algorithms that SIPI was developing. He wanted an image that was glossy, had a complex mix of colors and textures, and one that contained a human face. The engineers at SIPI came across a Playboy centerfold of Swedish model Lena Söderberg—her name in the magazine spelled ‘Lenna’ to encourage its proper pronunciation. Lenna wore a feathered Panama hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa, which seemed to offer the required image properties for testing their compression algorithms. The SIPI engineers took the top third of the centerfold only so that the image would be sized appropriately to be wrapped around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner and so that the resulting digital image would be 512px by 512px square. The scanner had custom analog-to-digital converters installed to capture the red, green, and blue channels of the scan in digital code that was then stored on a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer.1