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" 1 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. 2

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. 3 4

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

{% include 'dashboard.html' %}

{% include 'supplementary_header.html' %}

A visualization of 81,973 head annotations from the Brainwash dataset training partition. © megapixels.cc

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)

49 of the 11,918 images included in the Brainwash dataset. License: Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication (PDDL)

TODO

• change supp images to 2x2 grid with bboxes
• add bounding boxes to the header image
• remake montage with randomized images, with bboxes
• add ethics link to Stanford
• add optout info

{% include 'cite_our_work.html' %}

References