In this section, we'll implement a convolutional neural network for image classification. We are going to use the famous dataset of handwritten digits called the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST), which can be found at http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/. The dataset is a standard that was proposed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to calibrate and compare image recognition methods using machine learning, primarily based on neural networks.
The creators of the dataset used a set of samples from the US Census Bureau, with some samples written by students of American universities added later. All the samples are normalized, anti-aliased grayscale images of 28 x 28 pixels. The MNIST database contains 60,000 images for training and 10,000 images for testing. There...
