Image Easter egg - Undocumented Matlab

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;

To see the image right-side up:

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

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?

2 Responses

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. 🙂
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!

SKM (19 days 8 hours ago): It is 10 years since the original article, but I would like to bring to attention that such issues have not yet been resolved. For example, programmatically opening and closing files in...
Yair Altman (49 days 18 hours ago): @Ken – I cannot reproduce your report, it works as expected for me even on R2022b
Yair Altman (49 days 21 hours ago): try to use the waitfor function
Danila Berezin (54 days 8 hours ago): Hi I have a similar issue. Did you find a workaround for this?
Ken Johnson (62 days 22 hours ago): Why does the second catch block in this code example not work? (It works if you restart MATLAB and then omit the first try-catch block.) try a = [0,0;0,0]\[1;1]; catch...
Santiago (67 days 12 hours ago): It works perfectly. Thanks so much.
Yair Altman (67 days 18 hours ago): Santiago – you can get the mouse X,Y positions from the Java eventData object (getX(), getY()), convert this into a point (p=java.awt.Point(x,y)), then use the JTable...
Santiago (68 days 9 hours ago): Hi Yair. I’m using the MouseReleasedCallback but I need to get the indices of the selected cell. I can get them without problems with left clicks but, if I try to do it with...
Yair Altman (86 days 13 hours ago): Adam – perhaps there is a builtin syntax-pane control for uifigures, but I am not aware of one. Perhaps you can try to implement a uihtml panel with a GeSHi...
Yair Altman (86 days 13 hours ago): Marcel – 12 years and ~25 releases since I wrote this article, it is no surprise at all that some things no longer work the same way. In fact, the surprising thing is that...
Yair Altman (86 days 14 hours ago): See the documentation of the uitree function. The text in my article refers to the legacy (Java-based) uitree version, which is not documented, whereas it is documented and...
SOULEYMANE Zakaria (91 days 19 hours ago): Hello. Thank you for sharing. I would like to know if someone could help me with the syntax it takes to use uitree on “Appdesigner”. When I use the syntax you...
Nicholas (92 days 7 hours ago): Hello Yair, Have you, or anyone else, had an opportunity to try this demo in R2022a/b? I cannot get the HTMLBrowserPanel object to update with html text (nor with an html file, if...
Marcel (104 days 19 hours ago): Hi, I am trying to set the legend to Static, but this command seems not to work in R2022a anymore: set(gca,’LegendColorbarL isteners’,[]); Any ideas? THANKS / marcel
Gres (104 days 23 hours ago): In 2018b, you can get the icons by calling [hh,icons,plots,txt] = legend({‘Line 1’});

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