The Fashion MNIST dataset is a large freely available database of fashion images that is commonly used for training and testing various machine learning systems.
[1][2] Fashion-MNIST was intended to serve as a replacement for the original MNIST database for benchmarking machine learning algorithms, as it shares the same image size, data format and the structure of training and testing splits.
The dataset is commonly included in standard machine learning libraries.
[4] The set of images in the Fashion MNIST database was created in 2017 to pose a more challenging classification task than the simple MNIST digits data, which saw performance reaching upwards of 99.7%.
[12] The dataset was also used as a benchmark in the 2018 Science paper using all optical hardware to classify images at the speed of light.