The MNIST database of handwritten digits has a training set of 60,000 examples, and a test set of 10,000 examples. The digits have been size-normalized and centered in a fixed-size image.

It is a good dataset for people who want to try learning techniques and pattern recognition methods on real-world data while spending minimal efforts on preprocessing and formatting.

Originally available at http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/

Yann LeCun (Courant Institute, NYU) and Corinna Cortes (Google Labs, New York) hold the copyright of MNIST dataset, which is a derivative work from original NIST datasets. MNIST dataset is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. The original files are provided here with no modifications.