The document discusses flattening images to provide them as input to multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). It explains that MINST handwritten digit images contain 28x28 pixels each, resulting in 784 pixels when flattened. Color images are 3D matrices with red, green, and blue channels, and must be converted to grayscale and downsampled before flattening. The flattened image can then be provided as input to an MLP for classification or other tasks.