Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research details the 'Hello World' of image classification: a convolutional neural network (CNN) applied to the MNIST digits dataset.

Creating a custom image classification model is challenging, but the existence of neural network libraries like Keras has made it doable. Here's how, with many code samples and a full project download ...

For the MNIST data set, the input images are handwritten digits in the range 0 to 9 [10]. The training and test data sets contain 60,000 and 10,000 labeled images, respectively.