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Image Easter egg

Posted By Yair Altman On April 6, 2010 | 2 Comments

Last year I presented the Matlab Spy Easter egg [1] 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
Default image

To see the image right-side up:

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 [2]. 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?

Categories: Low risk of breaking in future versions, Stock Matlab function, Undocumented feature


2 Comments (Open | Close)

2 Comments To "Image Easter egg"

#1 Comment By Steve Eddins On April 6, 2010 @ 11:30

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 Comment By Rafael On April 6, 2010 @ 13:44

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


Article printed from Undocumented Matlab: https://undocumentedmatlab.com

URL to article: https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/image-easter-egg

URLs in this post:

[1] Spy Easter egg: http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/spy-easter-egg/

[2] explained by Steve Eddins in his Image Processing blog: http://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2006/10/17/the-story-behind-the-matlab-default-image/

[3] Spy Easter egg : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/spy-easter-egg

[4] Spy Easter egg take 2 : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/spy-easter-egg-take-2

[5] Auto-scale image colors : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/auto-scale-image-colors

[6] Plot legend title : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/plot-legend-title

[7] Customizing axes part 2 : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/customizing-axes-part-2

[8] FIG files format : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/fig-files-format

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