Introduction

Computer Vision is a field of study that deals with algorithms and techniques that enable computers to process and interact with the visual world. Over the years, researchers have developed algorithms that _train _computers to analyze digital images and videos by learning from labels or discovering patterns.¹

Computer Vision(CV) is a field that’s teeming with use cases, from detecting faces in images, to recognizing individual objects in pictures, to even cancer detection by analyzing x-ray images. These features have tremendous potential for businesses and beyond, however, building these models from scratch often requires considerable know-how and resources, which a lot of businesses may not yet have access to, thankfully we can leverage pre-trained models and fully managed solutions like Azure Computer Vision that abstracts most of the lower level engineering for these coveted solutions.

The Azure Computer Vision API is a core offering of Azure’s Cognitive services, which are cloud-based AI offerings that allows developers to leverage state of the art artificial intelligence techniques with the flexibility and scalability of the Cloud. The Computer Vision API provides a range of features that perform cognitive tasks on images, the API can be used to extract written text from images, detect adult content, describe the contents an image in full sentences and much more. They are also other more specialized APIs part of Azure’s Cognitive solutions that perform a range of CV tasks like the Face API that specializes on face related cognitive tasks such as facial recognition(Article coming soon).

Uses of Computer Vision API

These are just a hand full of the possible uses of the Computer Vision API in your apps or businesses:

• Classifying images for stock keeping.
• Detecting Faces in images.
• Extracting printed and written text from images using optical character recognition (OCR).
• Detecting inappropriate images for a content moderation systems.
• Describing an Image in full sentences.
• Analyzing videos.
• Generating thumbnails for images.

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