Image Easter egg

Last year I presented the Matlab Spy Easter egg for the 2009 Easter holiday. This year, slightly late, I present another Easter egg in the well-known image function: When we run image with no input arguments, we get a default image of an inverted boy:

image;

Default image

To see the image right-side up:

image;
colormap(gray(32));
axis ij image off

Corrected default image

In fact, it turns out that there are quite a few hidden super-imposed images here, and that there is an interesting story behind them, which was explained by Steve Eddins in his Image Processing blog. For those interested, the boy above is Steve’s eldest, but that’s only a small part of the story…

Happy Holiday!

Yair

p.s. – The default image has not changed in many years. I guess the boy should be in high school or college by now. Perhaps it’s time to post an updated picture in the R2010b release, Steve?

Related posts:

1. Spy Easter egg The built-in Matlab function spy has an undocumented feature (Easter egg) when it is called with no input arguments....
2. Spy Easter egg take 2 The default spy Easter-egg image in the spy function has recently changed. ...
3. Docs of old Matlab releases MathWorks recently posted archived documentation for many previous Matlab releases...
4. Matrix processing performance Matrix operations performance is affected by internal subscriptions in a counter-intuitive way....
5. Modifying default toolbar/menubar actions The default Matlab figure toolbar and menu actions can easily be modified using simple pure-Matlab code. This article explains how....
6. FIG files format FIG files are actually MAT files in disguise. This article explains how this can be useful in Matlab applications....