Introduction

In this post we are going to create a simple reverse image search on the MNIST handwritten image dataset. That is to say, given any image, we want to return images that look most similar to it. To do this, we will use an autoencoder, trained using Tensorflow 2.

The dataset

The MNIST dataset is a commonly-used dataset in machine learning comprised of 28-by-28 images of handwritten digits between 0 and 9. For our purposes we would be interested in our image searcher returning images of the same number as the query images, i.e. if we input a 3 we want the images returned to all be 3s. However, if we had, say, four 3s and one 2 that mightn’t be too bad, considering how 2 and 3 look a bit similar. However, if we had three 3s, one 1 and a 7 we might say that the performance is not up to standard.…