MegaPixels

Brainwash is a dataset of webcam images taken from the Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco in 2014

The Brainwash dataset includes 11,918 images of "everyday life of a busy downtown cafe" and is used for training head detection surveillance algorithms

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.

Who used Brainwash Dataset?

This bar chart presents a ranking of the top countries where dataset citations originated. Mouse over individual columns to see yearly totals. These charts show at most the top 10 countries.

Biometric Trade Routes

To help understand how Brainwash Dataset has been used around the world by commercial, military, and academic organizations; existing publicly available research citing Brainwash Dataset was collected, verified, and geocoded to show the biometric trade routes of people appearing in the images. Click on the markers to reveal research projects at that location.

Academic
Commercial
Military / Government

Citation data is collected using SemanticScholar.org then dataset usage verified and geolocated.

Dataset Citations

The dataset citations used in the visualizations were collected from Semantic Scholar, a website which aggregates and indexes research papers. Each citation was geocoded using names of institutions found in the PDF front matter, or as listed on other resources. These papers have been manually verified to show that researchers downloaded and used the dataset to train or test machine learning algorithms.

Supplementary Information

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

Cite Our Work

If you use our data, research, or graphics please cite our work:

@online{megapixels,
  author = {Harvey, Adam. LaPlace, Jules.},
  title = {MegaPixels: Origins, Ethics, and Privacy Implications of Publicly Available Face Recognition Image Datasets},
  year = 2019,
  url = {https://megapixels.cc/},
  urldate = {2019-04-20}
}

References

a
"readme.txt" https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/catalog/sx925dc9385.
a
Stewart, Russel. Andriluka, Mykhaylo. "End-to-end people detection in crowded scenes". 2016.
a
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.
a
Zhao. X, Wang Y, Dou, Y. A Replacement Algorithm of Non-Maximum Suppression Base on Graph Clustering.