Rust-mnist is an MNIST dataset parser written in rust. It is simple and lightweight, not unreasonably slow and features some helpful error messages to get you started.
See examples/perceptron.rs for a rudamentary demonstration.
You will need to download and extract the dataset from http://yann.lecun.org/exdb/mnist/index.html before use.
You may also want to add rust-mnist to your Cargo.toml, so that Cargo can manage it as a dependency for you:
[dependencies]
rust-mnist = "0.2"
Finally, you may want to use some logging implementation if you'd like to see info
or debug
information from rust-mnist. I'd recommend fern.
Please note that this is a new project, made for my own use, and may feature frequent breaking changes until it stabilizes. You can stay up to date on these changes by reading the CHANGELOG.md.