LenPEG (2017)

https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/lenpeg.html

by tosh • 6 years ago

78 44 6 years ago

wongarsu• 6 years ago

This is pretty much what most machine learning methods would do if you give them the task "make an image compression algorithm that compresses our test image as good as possible".

ky32• 6 years ago

Worth filing under: Gaming the System, in this case: image compression benchmarks.

Not everything that counts can be counted.

krick• 6 years ago

You mean more like "Not everything that can be counted — counts." If everything that counts can be counted is debatable.

ky32• 6 years ago

No, I actually mean what I wrote: Not everything that counts can be counted. Take the happiness produced by a piece of software. Can we put a number on it?

Contrast Lord Kelvin: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”

And also this doozy writ large in our lives: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

jsheard3• 6 years ago

LenPEGs average compression ratio has sharply fallen since journals started discouraging the use of Lenna as a test image

The field is ripe for disruption by finding the new optimal image to use as the special case

frutiger3• 6 years ago

This is of course a joke, but most compression competitions include the size of the decompressor.

imoverclocked2• 6 years ago

Trivially, it's effectively 0 for LenPEG 3. Answering this for LenPEG4 may be NP-complete. Any significant research into answering it for 4 is bound to drive up AMZN in the short term due to the inevitability of using all of S3's available space.

Maybe the better question is, "how long can on-disk compression protect humanity from LenPEG 4?"

frutiger3• 6 years ago

Trivially, it's effectively 0 for LenPEG 3.

I don’t think so? The decompressor needs to have a copy of the image to display if it goes to step 1 of its decompression algorithm.

neilv3• 6 years ago

For anyone who doesn't know... Although the Lenna reference image has historical significance within some fields (and that's part of the joke of the article), you probably don't want to use it in your work today:

In 2018, the Nature Research family of journals announced that they would no longer consider articles using the Lenna image.[19] In the same year SPIE, the publishers of Optical Engineering, also announced that they would discourage the use of the Lenna image, and would no longer consider new submissions containing the image "without convincing scientific justification for its use".[20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Criticism

ad404b8a372f2b93• 6 years ago

That's pretty sad, I remember seeing the Lenna image 20ish years ago when I first looked into computer vision, I was a kid back then and I dreamed of one day publishing a paper with this image in it (that's how ubiquitous it was, to me it was the incarnation of CV). I used it often on my website just a few years ago to demonstrate CV projects. I don't find it sexist, I'll keep using it.

jhardy54• 6 years ago

I don't find it sexist, I'll keep using it.

How do women in your industry feel about it?

jsheard3• 6 years ago

Even if you overlook the sexism angle, it's always been legally dubious since Playboy owns the copyright and never gave permission for it to be used by researchers.

Plus the canonical 1970s-era digitization is low resolution and lacking in detail compared to modern digital photography. Take all three factors together and it's clearly time to move on.

tombert2• 6 years ago

I understand that it is a pretty-ok image for playing with image processing stuff, but do you not think that using literal porn might breed a bad atmosphere in a professional environment?

I'm definitely guilty of using the image, I still occasionally use it on my home computer if I'm playing with image processing stuff, but I purposefully do not use it for anything that any other human is likely to see, since I don't want to be the reason to make someone feel unwelcome in the tech space.

neilv3• 6 years ago

I'd like to ask you to reconsider, and here's why...

I imagine that the image was originally used with a sense of whimsy, with no harm intended, and then it was adopted into the culture of some fields, and given new meaning there within those fields, however we now know (at least when it's pointed out) that it does send some very unwelcoming messages, which affects both the fields and broader society.

I think one of the unwelcoming messages that would be sent by continuing to use the image is: knowing that it's associated with a long history of serious exclusion and unfairness, were we to use the image anyway, that would say we care more about the field's old in-joke, than we care about injustices and about being welcoming to everyone interested in the field.

This seems like one of those situations in which we don't realize something is a problem, but once we realize it (maybe someone has to mention it, and we look into it), then we do what we can to correct it. In the most limited interpretation of the problem, the correction might be as simple as using a different image in our examples, and it's perhaps the very least one can do.

tombert2• 6 years ago

I remembered when I was interning about 10 years ago at Lockheed Martin doing computer vision work, we were using the Lenna image as a testbed image inside Matlab. I remember when I was installing the repo, my manager told me to use the Lenna image, and I asked him what it was, and he said "don't google it on a work computer!".

He explained to me the origins, and actually gave me the image file from a flash drive, just to minimize the likelihood of me getting in trouble. While obviously the normal Lenna image itself is fairly innocuous, he was afraid that porn might come up if I were to look up anything in Google images, which probably would not look great on an intern's computer.

In hindsight, maybe it's best to not use images that could risk getting anyone in trouble, not to mention that it probably breeds a "boy's club" atmosphere.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

It's less sexist now because we removed all the women.

KaiserPro2• 6 years ago

even if you don't subscribe to the social criticisms, Lena simply isn't representative of imagery nowadays. The colour balance is wrong, its from film and the dynamic range is limited.

You're better off montecarlo sampling 20 images from instagram using different geolocations.

panta5• 6 years ago

Please please no, we'd end up having max hdr and saturation as a reference. If anything, we need to dial down these, not up.

detay• 6 years ago

I'm surprised there hasn't been a solution with a docker image yet.

jbaber• 6 years ago

Tiny interview with Lena herself and some history: https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...

m463• 6 years ago

Now with the "buy a disk" modifications to lenpeg, the endgame can only be to destroy the universe during compression and do the "let there be light" if no universe is found during decompression

LenPEG (2017)

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