------------

status: published
title: Brainwash
desc: Brainwash is a dataset of webcam images taken from the Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco in 2014
subdesc: The Brainwash dataset includes 11,918 images of "everyday life of a busy downtown cafe" and is used for training head detection surveillance algorithms
slug: brainwash
cssclass: dataset
image: assets/background.jpg
year: 2015
published: 2019-4-18
updated: 2019-4-18
authors: Adam Harvey

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## Brainwash Dataset

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Brainwash is a dataset of livecam images taken from San Francisco's Brainwash Cafe. It includes 11,918 images of "everyday life of a busy downtown cafe"[^readme] captured at 100 second intervals throught the entire day. The Brainwash dataset includes 3 full days of webcam images taken on October 27, November 13, and November 24 in 2014. According the author's [reserach paper](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/End-to-End-People-Detection-in-Crowded-Scenes-Stewart-Andriluka/1bd1645a629f1b612960ab9bba276afd4cf7c666) introducing the dataset, the images were acquired with the help of Angelcam.com[^end_to_end]

The Brainwash dataset is unique because it uses images from a publicly available webcam that records people inside a privately owned business without any consent. No ordinary cafe customer would ever suspect that their image would end up in dataset used for surveillance research and development, but that is exactly what happened to customers at Brainwash cafe in San Francisco.

Although Brainwash appears to be a less popular dataset, it notably was used in 2016 and 2017 by researchers affiliated the National University of Defense Technology in China for two [research](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Localized-region-context-and-object-feature-fusion-Li-Dou/b02d31c640b0a31fb18c4f170d841d8e21ffb66c) [projects](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Replacement-Algorithm-of-Non-Maximum-Suppression-Zhao-Wang/591a4bfa6380c9fcd5f3ae690e3ac5c09b7bf37b) on advancing the capabilities of object detection to more accurately isolate the target region in an image ([PDF](https://www.itm-conferences.org/articles/itmconf/pdf/2017/04/itmconf_ita2017_05006.pdf)). [^localized_region_context] [^replacement_algorithm]. The dataset also appears in a 2017 [research paper](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7877809) from Peking University for the purpose of improving surveillance capabilities for "people detection in the crowded scenes". 

![caption: A visualization of 81,973 head annotations from the Brainwash dataset training partition. Credit: megapixels.cc. License: Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication (PDDL)](assets/brainwash_grid.jpg)

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![caption: An sample image from the Brainwash dataset used for training face and head detection algorithms for surveillance. The dataset contains 11,916 more images like this one.  Credit: megapixels.cc. License: Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication (PDDL)](assets/brainwash_example.jpg)

![caption: A visualization of the active regions for 81,973 head annotations from the Brainwash dataset training partition. Credit: megapixels.cc. License: Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication (PDDL)](assets/brainwash_saliency_map.jpg)

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### Footnotes

[^readme]: "readme.txt" https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/catalog/sx925dc9385.
[^end_to_end]: Stewart, Russel. Andriluka, Mykhaylo. "End-to-end people detection in crowded scenes". 2016. 
[^localized_region_context]: Li, Y. and Dou, Y. and Liu, X. and Li, T. Localized Region Context and Object Feature Fusion for People Head Detection. ICIP16 Proceedings. 2016. Pages 594-598.
[^replacement_algorithm]: Zhao. X, Wang Y, Dou, Y. A Replacement Algorithm of Non-Maximum Suppression Base on Graph Clustering.