MNIST

As this is a very commonly used dataset, there is a utility function to help load it in:

This is identical to the CIFAR function. To check out usage instructions, have a look there. Note that the return size for MNIST will be 28x28x1.

In particular, there exists two functions in this module that may be of use. The first is dataset_loading.mnist.load_mnist_data(), which can be used to load in MNIST without queues. There is an argument for this function to request it to download MNIST if you haven’t already got it.

The second is dataset_loading.cifar.get_mnist_queues() which will load MNIST and put it into some queues. Although MNIST is very small and can easily fit into memory, the benefit of this is parallel processing can be used to prescale the data before feeding it to your network. For more examples on how to do this, see the page explaining loading in the CIFAR data.