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status: published
title: About MegaPixels
desc: About MegaPixels
slug: about
cssclass: about
published: 2018-12-04
updated: 2018-12-04
authors: Adam Harvey

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# About MegaPixels

<section class="about-menu">
<ul>
<li><a class="current" href="/about/">About</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/press/">Press</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/legal/">Legal / Privacy</a></li>
</ul>
</section>

MegaPixels is an independent art and research project by Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace investigating the ethics and individual privacy implications of publicly available face recognition datasets, and their role in industry and governmental expansion into biometric surveillance technologies.

The MegaPixels site is made possible with support from <a href="http://mozilla.org">Mozilla</a>

<div class="flex-container team-photos-container">
    <div class="team-member">
        <h3>Adam Harvey</h3>
        <p>is Berlin-based American artist and researcher. His previous projects (CV Dazzle, Stealth Wear, and SkyLift) explore the potential for counter-surveillance as artwork. He is the founder of VFRAME (visual forensics software for human rights groups) and is a currently researcher in residence at Karlsruhe HfG.</p>
        <p><a href="https://ahprojects.com">ahprojects.com</a></p>
        </p>
    </div>
    <div class="team-member">
        <h3>Jules LaPlace</h3>
        <p>is an American technologist and artist also based in Berlin. He was previously the CTO of a digital agency in NYC and now also works at VFRAME, developing computer vision and data analysis software for human rights groups. Jules also builds experimental software for artists and musicians.
        </p>
        <p><a href="https://asdf.us/">asdf.us</a></p>
    </div>
</div>

MegaPixels.cc is a research project about publicly available face recognition datasets. This website is based, in part, on an [earlier installations](https://ahprojects.com/megapixels-glassroom/) and research about facial recognition datasets. Since then it has evolved into a large-scale survey of publicly-available face and person analysis datasets. Initially this site was planned as a facial recognition tool to search the datasets. After building several prototypes using over 1 million face images from these datasets, it became clear that facial recognition was mereley a face similar search. The results were not accurate enough to align with goals of this website: to promote responsible use of data and expose existing and past ethical breaches.

An academic report and presentation on the findings of this project is forthcoming. Throughout 2019, this site will be updated with more datasets and research reports on the general themes of remote biometric analysis and media collected "in the wild". The continued research on MegaPixels is supported by a 1 year Researcher-in-Residence grant from Karlsruhe HfG (2019-2020).

When possible, and once thoroughly verified, data generated for MegaPixels will be made available for download on [github.com/adamhrv/megapixels](https://github.com/adamhrv/megapixels)

=== columns 3

#### Team

- Adam Harvey: Concept, research and analysis, design, computer vision
- Jules LaPlace: Information and systems architecture, data management, web applications

===========

#### Contributing Researchers

- Berit Gilma: Dataset statistics
- Beth (aka Ms. Celeb): Dataset usage verification
- Mathana Stender: Commercial usage verification

===========

#### Code and Libraries

- [Semantic Scholar](https://semanticscholar.org) for citation aggregation
- Leaflet.js for maps
- C3.js for charts
- ThreeJS for 3D visualizations
- PDFMiner.Six and Pandas for research paper data analysis

=== end columns

Please direct questions, comments, or feedback to [mastodon.social/@adamhrv](https://mastodon.social/@adamhrv)