Loading Street View House Numbers Dataset in Python
If you already have a &lt;HDF5 object reference&gt;, and you want to know the real data, here is one approach:

import h5py
labels_file = './sv/train/digitStruct.mat'
f = h5py.File(labels_file)
ref = f.get('/digitStruct/name').value[0][0]  # &lt;HDF5 object reference&gt;
print(f[ref].value)


In my environment, f[ref].value shows:

In [84]: f[ref].value
Out[84]: 
array([[ 49],
       [ 46],
       [112],
       [110],
       [103]], dtype=uint16)


For more information on object references, you can refer to http://docs.h5py.org/en/latest/refs.html