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

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: 2019-2-23
updated: 2019-2-23
authors: Adam Harvey

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### sidebar

+ Published: 2015
+ Images: 11,918
+ Faces: 91,146
+ Created by: Stanford University (US)<br>Max Planck Institute for Informatics (DE)
+ Funded by: Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication
+ Purpose: Head detection
+ Download Size: 4.1GB
+ Website: <a href="https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/catalog/sx925dc9385">stanford.edu</a>


## Brainwash Dataset

*Brainwash* is a head detection dataset created from San Francisco's Brainwash Cafe livecam footage. It includes 11,918 images of "everyday life of a busy downtown cafe"[^readme] captured at 100 second intervals throught the entire day. Brainwash dataset was captured during 3 days in 2014: October 27, November 13, and November 24. According the author's reserach paper introducing the dataset, the images were acquired with the help of Angelcam.com [cite orig paper].

Brainwash is not a widely used dataset but since its publication by Stanford University in 2015, it has notably appeared in several research papers from the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, China. In 2016 and in 2017 researchers there conducted studies on detecting people's heads in crowded scenes for the purpose of surveillance [^localized_region_context] [^replacement_algorithm].

If you happen to have been at Brainwash cafe in San Franscisco at any time on October 26, November 13, or November 24 in 2014 you are most likely included in the Brainwash dataset.

![caption: The pixel-averaged image of all Brainwash dataset images is shown with 81,973 head annotations drawn from the Brainwash training partition. (c) Adam Harvey](assets/brainwash_mean_overlay.jpg)


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![caption: An sample image from the Brainwash dataset used for training face and head detection algorithms for surveillance. The datset contains about 12,000 images. License: Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication (PDDL)](assets/00425000_960.jpg)

![caption: 49 of the 11,918 images included in the Brainwash dataset. License: Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication (PDDL)](assets/brainwash_montage.jpg)

#### Additional Resources

- The dataset author spoke about his research at the CVPR conference in 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl2fBKxwusQ>


TODO

- add bounding boxes to the header image
- remake montage with randomized images, with bboxes
- clean up intro text
- verify quote citations


### Footnotes

[^readme]: "readme.txt" https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/catalog/sx925dc9385.
[^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.