Playboyfounder and cultural icon Hugh Hefner's legacy of provocation and sexual liberality has been steering the online conversation since his death Wednesday night. But no matter how you feel about the company and mindset he built, he left behind a surprising gift, one that had an important impact on our digital world.

Namely, a photo from an issue of a 1972 Playboymagazine that was used as a test image during the creation of widely used image processing standards like JPEG and MPEG.

Hefner's magazine published an alluring photo that turned into an invaluable resource for generations of computer scientists. The subtle shot eventually became one of the most widely used test images for image processing algorithms. The model, Lena (sometimes anglicized as "Lenna") Soderberg, whose photo was used for the centerfold of Playboy's November 1972 issue, is now widely known as the "First Lady of the Internet."  

SEE ALSO:Playboy, basically: 'jk nudity is back lol'

This strange footnote in computer science history started way back in 1973, according to the IEEE Professional Communication Society. USC Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) assistant professor of electrical engineering Alexander Sawchuk was part of a group looking for an intriguing new image — preferably with a human face — to scan for a colleague's conference paper when someone came into the lab toting the Nov. 1972 Playboy.

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The team settled on the centerfold, tearing out its top third so the paper would fit on the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had tricked out with analog-to-digital converters for red, green, and blue, along with a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. They were aiming to produce a 512x512 image using the scanner, which had a resolution of 100 lines per inch, so they only scanned 5.12 inches of the pic, cropping out the more risqué aspects of the nude photo at the shoulders.

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The three sets of 512 colored lines that composed the image became the standard format for digital image processing and compression. Other researchers eventually tested their own algorithms against SIPI's using the photo of Lena. That led to mass distribution of the image by SIPI to other groups over the years — which resulted in an informal property dispute, then an unofficial arrangement with Playboyin the early 1990s — making the photo an icon within the image processing community.

Some credit the image for having an even greater impact. The photo helped engineers hone their compression algorithms, and better compression rates allowed computers to display more images — which some, like Jeff Seideman, who served as president of the Society of Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T), say enabled the modern age of digital communications and the internet as a whole.

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The subject of the photo, Lena Soderberg, eventually embraced her role in image processing history, appearing at an IS&T 50th anniversary event in 1997. The image has fallen out of popularity in recent years, both because of its lascivious and sexist history, and for more practical reasons as modern algorithms surpass its limited scope.

Still, Lena's legacy makes something like the television show Silicon Valley's sex-driven middle out compression breakthrough all the more realistic. A bunch of hormone-addled coders couldconceivably stumble upon a massive compression breakthrough based on theoretical jerk-off calculations — after all, modern image compression came about after an engineer walked into a lab with a Playboymag and showed off the centerfold.

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