Embedded Files
TraffickCam is a product of Imaging for Good, a 501(c)3 dedicated to the creation of technology for social impact.
The research and development of the TraffickCam application and image search is led by Dr. Abby Stylianou at Saint Louis University, Dr. Robert Pless at George Washington University, and Dr. Richard Souvenir at Temple University. This team of researchers has applied their collective decades of experience in computer vision and machine learning to develop state of the art approaches to recognizing hotels in images of victims of sex trafficking.
The research and development of the TraffickCam system has been supported by a variety of sources, including the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, the National Institute of Justice, and the Laboratory of Analytic Sciences, and has led to an assortment of peer reviewed research publications:
Traffickcam: Crowdsourced and computer vision based approaches to fighting sex trafficking, AIPR 2017
Visualizing deep similarity networks, WACV 2019
Improved embeddings with easy positive triplet mining, WACV 2020
Hard negative examples are hard, but useful, ECCV 2020
Visualizing paired image similarity in transformer networks, WACV 2022
Exploring CLIP for Real World, Text-based Image Retrieval, AIPR 2023
Hotel Recognition Using Object Ensembles, AIPR 2023
QuARI: Query Adaptive Retrieval Improvement, NeurIPS 2025
Our History
TraffickCam was first created in 2015 as a collaboration between the Exchange Initiative and Drs. Stylianou, Pless and Souvenir.
The Exchange Initiative was created by Nix Conference & Meeting Management to empower individuals and organizations with real resources to help end sex trafficking. Nix Conference & Meeting Management is one of just 13 U.S. companies and 43 worldwide honored as a 2014 Top Member by the internationally recognized Tourism Child-Protection Code of Conduct (TheCode.org) for their exceptional work to integrate child protection practices into their business.
In 2025, Imaging for Good was formed as a nonprofit organization to carry this work forward and to provide a long-term home for TraffickCam and future technology projects designed for public benefit. Building on a decade of research, collaboration, and community participation, Imaging for Good continues to advance tools that use technology to support anti-trafficking efforts and broader social-impact initiatives.
Page updated
Report abuse