Pixels: The Foundations of Computer Vision

In order to understand what happens in a computer vision model, we first have to understand how computers handle images. We’ll use one of the most famous datasets in computer vision, MNIST, for our experiments. MNIST contains images of handwritten digits, collected by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and collated into a machine learning dataset by Yann Lecun and his colleagues. Lecun used MNIST in 1998 in Lenet-5, the first computer system to demonstrate practically useful recognition of handwritten digit sequences. This was one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of AI.