Classifying handwritten digits

In the previous section, we covered a lot of the theory around neural networks, which can be a little overwhelming if you are new to this topic. In this section, we will classify handwritten digits from the popular MNIST dataset, which has been constructed by Yann LeCun and colleagues and serves as a popular benchmark dataset for machine learning algorithms.

We will train two different networks on it:

• a multilayer perceptron using OpenCV
• a deep neural net using Keras

Loading the MNIST dataset

The easiest way to obtain the MNIST dataset is using Keras:

In [1]: from keras.datasets import mnist
...     (X_train, y_train), (X_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data()
Out[1]: Using TensorFlow backend.
   ...