I've seen images that were designed for their purpose. Lena isn't that. The Lena photo was designed for Playboy's purposes, which aren't those of siggraph.
I have a picture somewhere which was designed for testing colour printing quality. It looks very different. It has a wider range of colours, some areas with subtle colour shifts and some with strong shifts, some sharp focus and some softer, some narrow lines, some edges, etc. It looks suitable for the job, much more so than Lena does.
You won't hear a bad word about Lena or nudes in general from me, but merely liking nudes doesn't make me think that Lena is a good test image for typical siggraph contributions.
While I agree with the article, I have a different theory of why this image stayed so long: because everyone knows it. Seeing the results of a new algorithm on an image that you've seen 1000 times before immediately illustrates what happens.
So in my opinion, it can only be replaced by another image that is similarly popular. It won't retire before that.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 23.1 ms ] threadI have a picture somewhere which was designed for testing colour printing quality. It looks very different. It has a wider range of colours, some areas with subtle colour shifts and some with strong shifts, some sharp focus and some softer, some narrow lines, some edges, etc. It looks suitable for the job, much more so than Lena does.
You won't hear a bad word about Lena or nudes in general from me, but merely liking nudes doesn't make me think that Lena is a good test image for typical siggraph contributions.
So in my opinion, it can only be replaced by another image that is similarly popular. It won't retire before that.