xbob.db.mnist 1.0.1

Modify your setup.py and download from PyPI

That is the easiest. Edit your setup.py in your satellite package and add the following entry in the install_requires section (note: ... means whatever extra stuff you may have in-between, don’t put that on your script):

install_requires=[
  ...
  "xbob.db.mnist",
],

Proceed normally with your bootstrap/buildout steps and you should be all set. That means you can now import the namespace xbob.db.mnist into your scripts.

Modify your buildout.cfg and download from git

You will need to add a dependence to mr.developer to be able to install from our git repositories. Your buildout.cfg file should contain the following lines:

[buildout]
...
extensions = mr.developer
auto-checkout = *
eggs = bob
       ...
       xbob.db.mnist

[sources]
xbob.db.mnist = git https://github.com/bioidiap/xbob.db.mnist.git
...

How to use this database API

After launching the python interpreter (assuming that the environment is properly set up), you could get the training set as follows:

>>> import xbob.db.mnist
>>> db = xbob.db.mnist.Database('PATH_TO_DATA_FROM_YANN_LECUN_WEBSITE') # 4 binary .gz compressed files
>>> images, labels = db.data(groups='train', labels=[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9])

In this case, this should return two NumPy arrays:

1. images contain the raw data (60,000 samples of dimension 784 [28x28 pixels images])

2. labels are the corresponding classes (digits 0 to 9) for each of the 60,000 samples

If you don’t have the data installed on your machine, you can also use the following set of commands that will:

1. first look for the database in the xbob/db/mnist/ subdirectory and use it if is available

2. or automatically download it from Yann Lecun’s website into a temporary folder, that will be erased when the destructor of the xbob.db.mnist database is called.

>>> import xbob.db.mnist
>>> db = xbob.db.mnist.Database() # Check for the data files locally, and download them if required
>>> images, labels = db.data(groups='train', labels=[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9])
>>> del db # delete the temporary downloaded files if any