EMNIST: Extending MNIST to handwritten letters

The MNIST dataset has become a standard benchmark for learning, classification and computer vision systems. Contributing to its widespread adoption are the understandable and intuitive nature of the task, the relatively small size and storage requirements and the accessibility and ease-of-use of the database itself. The MNIST database was derived from a larger dataset known as the NIST Special Database 19 which contains digits, uppercase and lowercase handwritten letters. This paper introduces a variant of the full NIST dataset, which we have called Extended MNIST (EMNIST), which follows the same conversion paradigm used to create the MNIST dataset. The result is a dataset that constitutes a more challenging…

• NI
  National Institute of Standards and Technology