sklearn/datasets/descr/digits.rst
.. _digits_dataset:
Data Set Characteristics:
:Number of Instances: 1797 :Number of Attributes: 64 :Attribute Information: 8x8 image of integer pixels in the range 0..16. :Missing Attribute Values: None :Creator: E. Alpaydin (alpaydin '@' boun.edu.tr) :Date: July; 1998
This is a copy of the test set of the UCI ML hand-written digits datasets https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Optical+Recognition+of+Handwritten+Digits
The data set contains images of hand-written digits: 10 classes where each class refers to a digit.
Preprocessing programs made available by NIST were used to extract normalized bitmaps of handwritten digits from a preprinted form. From a total of 43 people, 30 contributed to the training set and different 13 to the test set. 32x32 bitmaps are divided into nonoverlapping blocks of 4x4 and the number of on pixels are counted in each block. This generates an input matrix of 8x8 where each element is an integer in the range 0..16. This reduces dimensionality and gives invariance to small distortions.
For info on NIST preprocessing routines, see M. D. Garris, J. L. Blue, G. T. Candela, D. L. Dimmick, J. Geist, P. J. Grother, S. A. Janet, and C. L. Wilson, NIST Form-Based Handprint Recognition System, NISTIR 5469, 1994.
.. dropdown:: References