The MNIST dataset was developed for the US postal service to automatically read written postcodes on mail. The aim of our classifier is simple: to take the digits in the format provided and correctly identify the given digits. Digit identification has multiple applications in self-driving cars; one of the important applications is traffic sign detection—for example, detecting the speed limit.
You can see an example in the following screenshot:
Fig 6.17: Speed limit traffic signs
We are going to build a traffic sign detector in the next chapter using a German traffic sign dataset.
In the next section, we will start by loading the data.
