Image classification with TensorFlow or Keras

In this section, we shall revisit the problem of handwritten digits classification (with the MNIST dataset), but this time with deep neural networks. We are going to solve the problem using two very popular deep learning libraries, namely TensorFlow and Keras. TensorFlow (TF) is the most famous library used in production for deep learning models. It has a very large and awesome community. However, TensorFlow is not that easy to use. On the other hand, Keras is a high level API built on TensorFlow. It is more user-friendly and easy to use compared to TF, although it provides less control over low-level structures. Low-level libraries provide more flexibility. Hence TF can be tweaked much more as compared to Keras.

Classification with TF

First, we shall start with a very simple deep neural network, one containing only a single FC hidden layer (with ReLU activation) and a softmax FC layer, with no convolutional layer. The next screenshot shows the...