Computer Vision Image Analysis 4.0 improves image processing

Microsoft has released a public preview of the new Computer Vision Image Analysis API, which can describe images, detect objects, do smart cropping, detect people, and recognize text.

The API is part of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. Azure Cognitive Services are cloud-based artificial intelligence services for developers who want to embed artificial intelligence into their applications without having to train systems or delve into data science . The services are available through REST API and SDK and cover vision, sound, speech and analysis.

The latest version of Computer Vision Image Analysis 4.0 is described as combining existing and new visual features such as reading (character recognition), description, image classification and labeling, object detection, people detection, smart cropping. Developers can run all of these functions on an image with a single API call.

One of the major improvements in this release is the Reading (OCR) feature, which is more tightly integrated with the Computer Vision service. It also works faster, providing a “near real-time experience”. The reading function has also been expanded to support more languages ​​- now there are 164 of them, including Cyrillic, Arabic and Hindi.