MNIST Database

The MNIST database is a large collection of handwritten digit images used for training and testing image recognition systems. It contains 70,000 grayscale pictures of numbers 0 through 9, with each image standardized to the same size and quality. Researchers and developers use this data to teach computers how to identify and classify handwritten digits, which helps advance technologies like OCR (optical character recognition). MNIST serves as a benchmark for testing machine learning algorithms due to its simplicity and wide adoption, enabling progress in the field of image recognition.