Random ideas I am investigating using FANN.
Fast Artificial Neural Network Library is a free open source neural network library, which implements multilayer artificial neural networks in C with support for both fully connected and sparsely connected networks.
You can download the MNIST database for free at: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/
The MNIST database of handwritten digits, available from this page, has a training set of 60,000 examples, and a test set of 10,000 examples. It is a subset of a larger set available from NIST. The digits have been size-normalized and centered in a fixed-size image.