Series introduction
Welcome to a new series of short articles I am presenting about Artificial Intelligence specifically in the Azure AI stack. The objective is that you will learn about an Azure based AI service in no more than one minute and thus quickly get familiar with the entire stack over a short period of time. These are going short, easily digestible articles so let's get started!
What is Computer Vision?
You can use Computer Vision in your application by invoking the REST API directly or by using a native SDK. Computer Vision’s algorithms will allow you to process images and return information, by either uploading an image or specifying an image URL.
The images to be analysed need to meet the following requirements,
- The image must be presented in JPEG, PNG, GIF, or BMP format
- The file size must be less than 4 megabytes (MB)
- The dimensions of the image must be greater than 50 x 50 pixels
You can use Computer Vision to analyse images and provide insights about their characteristics and features, including the following- tag visual features, detect objects, detect brands, categorize and describe images, detect faces, image types and colour schemes, detect domain specific content and generate thumb nails. You can also use it to analyse video content in near real-time.
Computer Vision also allows you to extract text from an image using optical character recognition (OCR). OCR supports 25 languages and automatically detects the language of the recognised text.
The Read API can be used to extract text, both printed and handwritten, from images such as posters, business cards, posters and letters.