MNIST database of handwritten digits in MATLAB format

This repository provides a simple conversion function of the original MNIST dataset into MATLAB .mat format for easy usage. Be sure to also pull the submodules containing the original MNIST dataset.

In order to convert the data, execute

convertMNIST

once in this directory, which will create mnist.mat. After that, you can use

load('mnist.mat')

which will load two variables into your workspace:

• training, which contains the training set and
• test, which contains the test set.

Both variables are represented as structures of the following fields:

• count: The number N of images
• width: The width W of each image
• height: The height H of each image
• images: A H by W by N array of all images
• labels: An array of N values describing the image label

The images are encoded as doubles with a range of 0..1, where 0 is background and 1 is foreground. The original MNIST dataset interprets these as 0 for white and 1 for black.

The labels field is encoded as categorical double values in the range of 0 through 9 inclusive.