In recent years, I have started doing work in image analysis and have used the Barbara and Lena images. Early on, I became aware of the interesting history surrounding the Lena image and that got me wondering:
Who is Barbara?
Where was the photograph shot?
What was the original intent of the photographer? Presumably, the photograph wasn't taken for image research.
Many people cite Allen Gersho's lab or Marco Schmidt's (now defunct) test image database. However, this is a bit unsatisfying to me.
The appeal of this image is obviously in the numerous lines, which test the aliasing properties of resizing, denoising, and super-resolution algorithms.
It seems Allen Gersho is the source, according to the Acknowledgement section of Shapiro's Embedded image coding using zerotrees of wavelet coefficients [PDF] (1993).
The author would like to thank Joel Zdepski who suggested incorporating the sign of the significant values into the significance map to aid embedding, Rajesh Hingorani who wrote much of the original C code for the QMF-pyramids, Allen Gersho who provided the original "Barbara" image, and Gregory Wornell whose fruitful discussions convinced me to develop a more mathematical analysis of zerotrees in terms of bounding an optimal estimator. I would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers whose comments led to a greatly improved manuscript.
If you want more specific information you could ask him or one of his students from the early 90s, when this image first seems to have appeared.
