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

status: published
title: Brainwash
desc: <span style="color:#ffaa00">Brainwash</span> is a dataset of people from webcams the Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco being used to train face detection algorithms
subdesc: Brainwash dataset includes 11,918 images of "everyday life of a busy downtown cafe"
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

+ Collected: 2014
+ Published: 2015
+ Images: 11,918
+ Faces: 91,146
+ Created by: Stanford Department of Computer Science
+ Funded by: Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication
+ Resolution: 640x480px
+ Size: 4.1GB
+ Origin: Brainwash Cafe, San Franscisco
+ Purpose: Training face detection
+ Website: <a href="https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/catalog/sx925dc9385">stanford.edu</a>
+ Paper: <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.04878">End-to-End People Detection in Crowded Scenes</a>


## Brainwash Dataset

*Brainwash* is a face detection dataset created from the Brainwash Cafe's livecam footage including 11,918 images of "everyday life of a busy downtown cafe[^readme]". The images are used to develop face detection algorithms for the "challenging task of detecting people in crowded scenes" and tracking them.

Before closing in 2017, Brainwash Cafe was a "cafe and laundromat" located in San Francisco's Lower Haight district. The cafe published a publicy available livestream from the cafe with a view of the cash register, performance stage, and seating area.

Since it's publication by Stanford in 2015, the Brainwash dataset has appeared in several notable research papers. In September 2016 four researchers from the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, China used the Brainwash dataset for a research study on "people head detection in crowded scenes", concluding that their algorithm "achieves superior head detection performance on the crowded scenes dataset[^localized_region_context]". And again in 2017 three researchers at the National University of Defense Technology used Brainwash for a study on object detection noting "the data set used in our experiment is shown in Table 1, which includes one scene of the brainwash dataset[^replacement_algorithm]".

![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)

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### Additional Information

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


### 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.