by Peter Nowak
While the other three images were all but ignored, Sjööblom’s picture quickly became the industry’s de facto standard. As imaging publications noted in later years, it was impossible to work in the industry without being constantly exposed to the photo, which became known simply as “the Lena.” Thumbing through industry journals in the seventies and eighties often turns up more than one Lena, sometimes dozens. “If the criterion is frequency of Lena, then the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing is by far the sexiest journal out there,” read a 2001 newsletter from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.9
The story behind the photo, like the best urban legends, was gradually forgotten. As the years wore on, scores of imaging scientists went about their daily algorithms without a clue as to where their sexy test subject came from. To them, she was “just Lena.”10 Like a modern-day Sleeping Beauty, however, the photo’s past was awakened in July 1991, when it was published on the front cover of industry journal Optical Engineering. The periodical’s editors didn’t know the photo belonged to Playboy and Playboy’s staff had no idea it was being used so widely by the research community. Playboy’s management sent a stern letter asking the journal’s editors to seek authorization before using any of the magazine’s images in the future, a request Optical Engineering was happy to oblige.11
As word of the photo’s origins spread and political correctness crept into society and the imaging community, the controversy deepened and the objections multiplied, many stemming from the belief that Playboy exploited women. David Munson, editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, urged scientists in a 1996 editorial to use other pictures for testing purposes, both to broaden their studies and to placate the many researchers, both men and women, who had complained to him. Munson says his editorial had its intended effect—after 1996, use of Sjööblom’s image dropped off. “People don’t talk about it as much as they used to,” he says.12
Nevertheless, by the mid-nineties the Lena had more than made its mark. In the seventies, it took several hours to transmit a photo over the ARPAnet. Using a good test image, researchers were able to refine compression algorithms to both shrink the size of files and speed up transmission technologies. In effect, they made the pipes faster and the data sent over them smaller. Transmission times of electronic photos dropped exponentially as a result. By the late eighties SIPI’s research had led standards bodies to agree on standardized formats for compressed images, including the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), as well as video compression with the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) standard.
Sawchuk is quite proud of that fact. When I visited USC, he showed me the original lab where the Lena photo was scanned. The space, on the third floor of one of the university’s engineering buildings, its imaging equipment moved long ago, now sits largely unused and looks like any nondescript classroom. Still, Sawchuk beams with pride in showing it off. “We should have a plaque on the door that says, ‘This is where the JPEG was born.’”
The JPEG became hugely important after the American government allowed phone companies such as MCI to connect their commercial email services to its ARPAnet in 1988, a move that effectively created the internet. Electronic text and images were married shortly after, in 1993, with the launch of Mosaic, the first software program to combine the two elements on a single “page” that resided on the internet. The pages became collectively known as the World Wide Web and individually as websites. Image compression work continued through the nineties and, combined with ever-faster network speeds, culminated in near-instantaneous transmission and loading of photos on the internet and Web by the early 2000s, with video not far behind. JPEGs, GIFs and MPEG also became the de facto image and video standards on the Web.
Miss Internet of the World
On my visit to SIPI, Sandy Sawchuk told me a story that pretty much summed up the broad reach of “the Lena.” In the mideighties he was visiting the state university of Novosibirsk, a Siberian city deep in the heart of communist Russia, when he was asked if he would like to see the school’s imaging lab. “Would I? Of course I would,” he told me. “So they showed me around and there of course was the Lena.” I also showed the picture to Vint Cerf, the legendary computer scientist who made the first connection on the ARPAnet, and he instantly recognized it. Like many who work in his field, however, Cerf had no idea it was a Playboy image until I told him. Kevin Craig, Playboy’s digital lab manager, tells the other side: “I asked one of the IT guys here and I mentioned her name and he instantly knew who it was. I asked him, ‘Is it more of an inside-IT geek thing?’ and he said that’s exactly what it is.”13
The imaging community suitably honoured Sjööblom, the Playmate who inadvertently influenced all those IT geeks, in 1997. Jeff Seideman, then-president of the Boston chapter of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, tracked her down in Sweden and invited her to appear as the guest of honour at the group’s fiftieth anniversary convention. By this point, Sjööblom had three children and several grandchildren and was going through a divorce. She was managing an office that employed disabled people to scan and archive corporate financial records, ironically using technology that traced its lineage back to SIPI. Seideman, a marketing specialist amid a sea of imaging scientists, convinced Playboy to capitalize on its former Playmate’s fame. The magazine paid for her flight to Boston, and when she showed up at the convention, attendees were floored. The forty-six-year-old still had her figure, but her long auburn tresses were gone in favour of a short cut, now grey. Her eyes, however, still had that mysterious spark. “Many of them had spent their entire professional lives staring at her picture and had long since forgotten that she was a real person,” Seideman says. “I introduced her to the main meeting and people were speechless. This creature that we dodged and burned and manipulated and sharpened and did obscene mathematical formulas to was a real human being.”14
Sjööblom was just as surprised. She had no idea how famous her picture had become. She graciously met and spoke with convention delegates and signed autographs, including copies of her Playboy issue. Kodak, the firm that had produced the first electronic camera and for which she had modelled, set up a booth where convention attendees could have their picture taken with Sjööblom, creating a virtual Möbius strip for the digital age. Sjööblom returned home to Järna with fond memories. Aside from her family and a few friends, no one there knows of her fame. A self-confessed Luddite, she doesn’t really understand the impact her photo had. “I’m not into the internet,” she told me over the phone from Sweden. She does, however, like the clock the imaging scientists gave her as a keepsake. “It’s pretty cool.”
Digital Shift
The same research that went into communications networks also paved the way for the development of many consumer electronic devices, notably digital cameras. Some of the earliest work on devices that could record images onto tapes rather than film began in the early seventies at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company started by William Shockley’s “traitorous eight.” In 1973 Fairchild developed the charge-coupled device (CCD), a light sensor chip that would in later years serve as the brains of a digital camera in much the same way that a microprocessor powers a computer. Kodak licensed the chip, which converted what was seen by a camera lens into an electronic file, and quietly built the first digital camera—a hefty, four-kilo device—in 1975.
The camera took twenty-three seconds to record a single black-and-white photo onto a cassette tape, which was then played back on a television screen through a separate, additional console. Kodak patented the camera in 1977, but didn’t put it into production because of its size and complexity.15 Steven Sasson, the engineer who built it, later said the company had applied Moore’s Law, which stated that electronics capabilities doubled roughly every eighteen months, to estimate when the digital camera would be compact and cheap enough to reach the general consumer market. Kodak’s best guess was fifteen to twenty years, which p
roved to be fairly close to the mark: “but in reality, we had no idea,” Sasson added.16 The irony in Kodak’s work on the electronic camera, which was kept secret for competitive reasons, was that Sjööblom—whose test image was doubtlessly used in the device’s development—was modelling for the company, not that Sasson or his team could have done anything about it even if they knew. Security around the camera was so tight that no one outside of technical staff was allowed into his lab, nor was he permitted to take it outside. Besides, Sasson told me, Sjööblom’s looks would have been squandered. “I had no idea that she was working there. I would have loved to have a model come and sit, but ... they would have been wasted on the quality of the camera.”17
Other camera and technology companies noticed Kodak’s patent and got to work on their own electronic devices. By the eighties, some had made significant progress in improving picture-capture times, camera weights and image sizes. Sony made a major breakthrough in 1981 when it developed a fivecentimetre-by-five-centimetre video floppy disc that allowed it to do away with tapes. Electronic cameras continued to improve throughout the decade, but by the nineties their photo quality was still nowhere near as good as film and they cost upward of $20,000. Still, there were some interested buyers, such as newspapers and the American military, both of whom deployed Kodak electronic cameras in the first Gulf War in 1991. The end of film really began in 1990, when Switzerland-based Logitech released the first true digital camera, which converted images to binary code, connected to a computer and stored images on a memory card.
The computer link finally allowed users to easily transfer photos from their cameras to their computers, where the images could be printed or sent over the internet. Memorychip capacities grew and image sizes shrank further through new compression techniques, which created a perfect inflection point in size and performance. Throughout the nineties, as the costs of charge-coupled devices plummeted and disc storage capacity rose steadily, digital cameras edged further toward the mainstream. Tokyo-based Nikon kicked the market into high gear in 1999 with the release of the D1, the first single lens reflex digital camera that was affordable to professional photographers. By the mid-2000s, the digital revolution was in full swing thanks to falling prices and continuing improvements in photo quality. In 2002 about 27.5 million digital cameras were sold, accounting for about 30 percent of the total still cameras shipped that year.18 By 2007 digital cameras had all but killed off their film-based predecessors and essentially made up the entire market, with more than 122 million units sold.19
The key to the whole revolution was the ever-decreasing size of the photo files themselves, an advance that reached a high point with the JPEG and MPEG standards established in 1988. Like the internet, all still cameras used JPEG as their standard file format by the mid-2000s, while video cameras relied on MPEG.
Eyes in the Sky
The U.S. military’s return on its original investment in SIPI also bore fruit in the form of improved satellite surveillance. Before SIPI, the CIA had relied on spy photos delivered through its top-secret Corona project, an initiative launched in 1960 to spy on the Soviet Union, China and other regions of concern. Corona’s satellites were equipped with high-altitude cameras that ejected spent film canisters, which parachuted to Earth only to be intercepted in mid-air by specially equipped aircraft. The canisters were designed to float in the ocean for a short time if they were missed in mid-air pickup, and then sink.20 Amid the tensions of the Cold War, Corona was a necessary but hugely inefficient project—only about 70 percent of the 144 satellites launched during the project’s twelve years returned usable imagery. There was also the constant risk that the parachuting film would literally fall into the wrong hands. The axe finally fell on Corona in May 1972, shortly before SIPI was founded, when a Soviet submarine was detected waiting below a mid-air retrieval zone.
The Landsat satellite program, which used sensors and cameras built by RCA and General Electric as well as an electronic transmission system that incorporated image compression started by SIPI, largely replaced Corona. Much of the Landsat project is still classified, so we can only guess at its military uses. Its commercial applications, however, have been widely publicized. Satellite imagery from the program has been purchased by agricultural, geological and forestry companies, and used by governments to predict and prevent natural disasters through the monitoring of weather patterns.
One of the program’s first major commercial customers was McDonald’s, which in its early days had scouted new locations by helicopter.21 In the eighties, the fast-food chain converted to using satellite photos to predict urban sprawl. McDonald’s later developed a software program called Quintillion that automated its site-selection process by combining satellite images with demographic data and sales projections. The software allowed the chain to spy on customers with the same equipment once used to fight the Cold War.22
Satellite photography was made broadly available in 1992, when Congress decided to sacrifice some of Landsat’s secrecy in order to offset the project’s cost. The Land Remote Sensing Policy Act declassified some of the data being produced and established that while “full commercialization of the Landsat program cannot be achieved within the foreseeable future ...commercialization of land remote sensing should remain a longterm goal of United States policy.”23
Landsat added a major new customer in the mid-2000s in the form of internet search engine provider Google, itself no stranger to the military. Company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page designed the algorithms that resulted in their ground-breaking search engine in the mid-nineties while they were students at Stanford University, right next door to Silicon Valley. The duo were the archetypal poor students, eating macaroni and cheese and begging for charity wherever they could get it. Among the handouts they received were computers from Stanford’s Digital Library project, which was funded by the government’s National Science Foundation, NASA and DARPA.
Google became the most successful company to emerge from the dot-com boom of the nineties by revolutionizing the internet with its innovative search engine. After striking it rich by tying search results to online advertisements, the company moved to diversify its business in 2004 by acquiring Silicon Valley–based start-up Keyhole. The smaller company’s main product was its EarthViewer 3D software, which used satellite imagery bought from Landsat and other commercial sources to create three-dimensional maps of the world. Keyhole was initially funded by Sony in 2001 and then backed by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm started in 1999 by the CIA to provide the intelligence agency with state-of-the-art spy technology.
The company was headed by John Hanke, who prior to receiving his MBA from Berkeley in 1996 worked in a nondescript “foreign affairs” capacity for the American government in Washington and Indonesia. When I asked Hanke what he did in foreign affairs during a visit to Google’s headquarters, he wasn’t exactly forthcoming. “Pretty much that. That’s really the extent of what I’ve said publicly, so let’s leave it at that,” he told me with a grin.24
The company’s main customers when it was acquired were the U.S. Army’s Communications Electronic Command and the Department of Defense. Keyhole, not coincidentally, was also the name of the satellites used in the Corona project. The company’s software was renamed and relaunched in 2005 as Google Earth, a program that wowed internet users with its lightning-fast rendering of satellite imagery. The pictures, benefiting from new super-fast computer processors, rapid internet speeds, and of course, better image compression, loaded so quickly that they looked like full-motion video. Google Earth users also enjoyed the unprecedented novelty of zooming in on any location on the planet and viewing it in extraordinary detail.
Like virtually every Google Earth user, the first thing I did with the software was navel-gaze. I zoomed in on my home and was astonished by the level of detail, like the garbage cans out on the sidewalk. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who was amazed: “Since its debut on the internet three years ago, Keyhole has had a hi
gh gee-whiz factor,” wrote a technology reviewer for the New York Times. “When I first saw the site, I sat transfixed as it zoomed from an astronaut’s-eye view of our planet down to a detailed shot of my house, with individual shrubs visible in the yard.”25
Google expanded the software in 2007 to include Hubble Space Telescope photos of the moon, the constellations and Mars, and added the ocean floor in 2009. The company’s internet competitors, including Microsoft, Yahoo and MapQuest, were all forced to follow suit with their own three-dimensional mapping software, creating a boom in the commercial satellite photography market.
While the loosening of restrictions succeeded in creating a vibrant market for satellite photography, it also created headaches for governments and privacy advocates around the world. Google Earth’s launch was immediately followed by media commentary on the software’s potential negative effects, from complaints about invasion of privacy to concerns over national security. “Terrorists don’t need to reconnoiter their target,” said Lieutenant General Leonid Sazhin, an analyst for the Federal Security Service, the Russian security agency that succeeded the KGB. “Now an American company is working for them.”26 Google deepened the criticism in 2007 when it launched Street View, a feature that provides 360-degree panoramic ground-level views of city streets. Communities and privacy watchdogs around the world, including those in Canada and the United Kingdom, have raised concerns about Street View or passed outright bans of the software. Google relented somewhat in 2008 when it agreed to blur people’s faces captured in Street View photos, but concerns about the company’s further intrusion into daily life continue to swirl.
Home Invasion
Playboy’s effect on imaging technology was accidental and indirect, but by the eighties, new technologies meant that the larger sex industry was exerting a much greater and more purposeful influence on the emerging home entertainment business. While cable television systems began rolling out in the United States in 1948, primarily to serve mountainous areas that couldn’t get strong over-the-air reception, they only gained acceptance in the late sixties when competition emerged in the form of satellite TV providers. Cable penetration went from only 6.4 percent of American households in 1968 to 17.5 percent ten years later and 52.8 percent in 1988.27 Rolling all that cable out, however, was costly for the providers, who needed quick revenue to justify the expense. Porn was just what the doctor ordered (or rather, what the companies’ shareholders ordered).