ChokePoint Dataset

The ChokePoint dataset is designed for experiments in person identification/verification under real-world surveillance conditions using existing technologies. An array of three cameras was placed above several portals (natural choke points in terms of pedestrian traffic) to capture subjects walking through each portal in a natural way. While a person is walking through a portal, a sequence of face images (ie. a face set) can be captured. Faces in such sets will have variations in terms of illumination conditions, pose, sharpness, as well as misalignment due to automatic face localisation/detection. Due to the three camera configuration, one of the cameras is likely to capture a face set where a subset of the faces is near-frontal.

The dataset consists of 25 subjects (19 male and 6 female) in portal 1 and 29 subjects (23 male and 6 female) in portal 2. The recording of portal 1 and portal 2 are one month apart. The dataset has frame rate of 30 fps and the image resolution is 800X600 pixels. In total, the dataset consists of 48 video sequences and 64,204 face images. In all sequences, only one subject is presented in the image at a time. The first 100 frames of each sequence are for background modelling where no foreground objects were presented.

Each sequence was named according to the recording conditions (eg. P2E_S1_C3) where P, S, and C stand for portal, sequence and camera, respectively. E and L indicate subjects either entering or leaving the portal. The numbers indicate the respective portal, sequence and camera label. For example, P2L_S1_C3 indicates that the recording was done in Portal 2, with people leaving the portal, and captured by camera 3 in the first recorded sequence.

To pose a more challenging real-world surveillance problems, two seqeunces (P2E_S5 and P2L_S5) were recorded with crowded scenario. In additional to the aforementioned variations, the sequences were presented with continuous occlusion. This phenomenon presents challenges in identidy tracking and face verification.

This dataset can be applied, but not limited, to the following research areas:

• person re-identification
• image set matching
• face quality measurement
• face clustering
• 3D face reconstruction
• pedestrian/face tracking
• background estimation and subtraction

Please cite the following paper if you use the ChokePoint dataset in your work (papers, articles, reports, books, software, etc):

• Y. Wong, S. Chen, S. Mau, C. Sanderson, B.C. Lovell
  Patch-based Probabilistic Image Quality Assessment for Face Selection and Improved Video-based Face Recognition
  IEEE Biometrics Workshop, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, pages 81-88, 2011.
  http://doi.org/10.1109/CVPRW.2011.5981881