Oxford Town Centre
The Oxford Town Centre dataset is a CCTV video of pedestrians in a busy downtown area in Oxford used for research and development of activity and face recognition systems. 1 The CCTV video was obtained from a surveillance camera at the corner of Cornmarket and Market St. in Oxford, England and includes approximately 2,200 people. Since its publication in 2009 2 the Oxford Town Centre dataset has been used in over 80 verified research projects including commercial research by Amazon, Disney, OSRAM, and Huawei; and academic research in China, Israel, Russia, Singapore, the US, and Germany among dozens more.
The Oxford Town Centre dataset is unique in that it uses footage from a public surveillance camera that would otherwise be designated for public safety. The video shows that the pedestrians act normally and unrehearsed indicating they neither knew of nor consented to participation in the research project.
Who used TownCentre?
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.
Information Supply chain
To help understand how TownCentre has been used around the world by commercial, military, and academic organizations; existing publicly available research citing Oxford Town Centre 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
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. If you use our data, please cite our work.
Supplementary Information
Location
The street location of the camera used for the Oxford Town Centre dataset was confirmed by matching the road, benches, and store signs source. At that location, two public CCTV cameras exist mounted on the side of the Northgate House building at 13-20 Cornmarket St. The upper camera, a public CCTV camera installed for security, is most likely the camera used to create this dataset.
The camera can be seen pointing in the same direction as the dataset's view in this public image, and the researchers used other existing public CCTV cameras for additional research projects increasing the likelihood that they could have had access to this camera.
The capture date is estimated to be during late November or early December in 2007 or 2008. The text on the storefront display shows a sale happening from December 2nd – 7th indicating the capture date was likely around this time. Prior to 2007 the Carphone Warehouse (photo, history) did not exist at this location. And since the sweaters in the GAP window display are more similar to those in a GAP website snapshot from November 2007, it was probably recorded in 2007. The slight waste residue near the bench and the lack street vendors that typically appear on a weekend, suggest that it was perhaps a weekday after rubbish removal.
Cite Our Work
If you find this analysis helpful, 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 = {2019-04-18}
}