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Image Easter egg

April 6, 2010 2 Comments

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;

image;

Default image
Default image

To see the image right-side up:

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

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

Corrected default image
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. Auto-scale image colors – Images can be automatically color-scaled for maximum resolution, using the undocumented MarkedClean event. ...
  4. Plot legend title – Titles to plot legends are easy to achieve in HG1 (R2014a or earlier), but much more difficult in HG2 (R2014b or newer). ...
  5. Customizing axes part 2 – Matlab HG2 axes can be customized in many different ways. This article explains some of the undocumented aspects. ...
  6. FIG files format – FIG files are actually MAT files in disguise. This article explains how this can be useful in Matlab applications....
Easter egg image Pure Matlab Undocumented feature
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2 Responses
  1. Steve Eddins April 6, 2010 at 11:30 Reply

    Almost college.

    Yes, it probably is time to change the image. But if it happens, I won’t be the one to do it this time. 🙂

  2. Rafael April 6, 2010 at 13:44 Reply

    Funny thing… I was just reading this yesterday in his blog, and now you post it here!

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