How to create a Image Dataset just like MNIST dataset?

Question

I have 10000 BMP images of some handwritten digits. If i want to feed the datas to a neural network what do i need to do ? For MNIST dataset i just had to write

(X_train, y_train), (X_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data() 

I am using Keras library in python . How can i create such dataset ?

Answer 1

You can either write a function that loads all your images and stack them into a numpy array if all fits in RAM or use Keras ImageDataGenerator (https://keras.io/preprocessing/image/) which includes a function flow_from_directory. You can find an example here https://gist.github.com/fchollet/0830affa1f7f19fd47b06d4cf89ed44d.