I had recently heard about Microsoft’s Cognitive Api. I decided I wanted to learn more about how to use them. This will explain my journey as I learned.

Start Here

You can check it out here. From there you can sign up, I used my Microsoft account to do so. You will get an email which you need to verify your email. Then you can check which of the cognitive services you would like to try. Once you subscribe you will get keys to use for each of the services.

Computer Vision

I was interested in the computer vision service so that’s what I started with. There is a Nuget package that makes it easy to use Microsoft.ProjectOxford.Vision. You simply use it like this.

var client = new VisionServiceClient("yourAPIKey");
var file = new FileStream("Pictures\\surface2.jpg", FileMode.Open);
var result = await client.DescribeAsync(file);

txtResults.Text = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(result, Formatting.Indented);

There I am using the DescribeAsync method on the picture of a Surface 2 and turning the result I get into Json. The following is what I get for this picture 

{
  "RequestId": "62dd6247-7802-48ad-8c96-cec14735702a",
  "Metadata": {
    "Height": 2419,
    "Width": 3629,
    "Format": "Jpeg"
  },
  "ImageType": null,
  "Color": null,
  "Adult": null,
  "Categories": null,
  "Faces": null,
  "Tags": null,
  "Description": {
    "Tags": [
      "indoor",
      "laptop",
      "computer",
      "sitting",
      "table",
      "black",
      "top",
      "monitor",
      "desk",
      "screen",
      "phone",
      "keyboard",
      "laying",
      "man"
    ],
    "Captions": [
      {
        "Text": "a laptop computer",
        "Confidence": 0.90010949437817545
      }
    ]
  }
}

It is fairly confident that it is “a laptop computer”. Since Microsoft says the Surface is a tablet that can replace your laptop, I guess that is a pretty accurate statement.

Sample

I made a little sample WPF app here that shows use of a few methods on the VisionServiceClient Api. It has three images in the Images folder, two of which I use the Describe method on, and the other one I use the GetTags method.

You can learn more about how to call the Computer Vision Api here. If you don’t want to use the VisionServiceClient you can call the Api with a query string as well. Also you can create a Cognitive Services account on Azure, something I plan to look into and write about how to do that.

Have you used the Computer Vision Api before?