As of April 2024, the IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has let it be known they'll no longer accept research papers with the iconic image of Lena – which is actually a crop of a Playboy centrefold from 1972.
Why should an early 70s Playboy image be an issue for "The trusted voice for engineering, computing, and technology around the globe" in 2024? Because the image – which in its full form was rather more revealing – was scanned at University of Southern California’s (USC) Signal and Image Processing Institute.
