Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services: Use Cognitive Services APIs to add AI capabilities to your applications , Third Edition

Leif Larsen Henning Larsen

€18.99 per month

Paperback Sep 2018 312 pages 3rd Edition

Leif Larsen Henning Larsen

€18.99 per month

Paperback Sep 2018 312 pages 3rd Edition

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Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services

Chapter 2. Analyzing Images to Recognize a Face

"We can use the Computer Vision API to prove to our clients the reliability of the data, so they can be confident making important business decisions based on that information."
- Leendert de Voogd, CEO of Vigiglobe

In the previous chapter, you were briefly introduced to Microsoft Cognitive Services. Throughout this chapter, we will dive into image-based APIs from the vision API. We will learn how to perform image analysis. Moving on, we will dive deeper into the Face API, which we briefly looked at in the previous chapter, and we will learn how you can identify people. Next, we will learn how to use the Face API to recognize emotions in faces. Finally, we will learn about the different ways to moderate content.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Analyzing images to identify content, metadata, and adult ratings.
Recognizing celebrities in images and reading text in images.
Diving into the Face API:
- Learning...

Analyze an image using the Computer Vision API

The Computer Vision API allows us to process an image and retrieve information about it. It relies on advanced algorithms to analyze the content of the image in different ways, based on our needs.

Throughout this section, we will learn how to take advantage of this API. We will look at the different ways to analyze an image through standalone examples. Some of the features we will cover will also be incorporated into our end-to-end application in a later chapter.

Calling any of the APIs will return one of the following response codes:

Code	Description
`200`	Information of the extracted features in JSON format.
`400`	Typically, this means bad request. It may be an invalid image URL, an image that is too small or too large, an invalid image format, or any other errors to do with the request body.
`415`	Unsupported media type.
`500`	Possible errors may include a failure to process the image, image processing timing out, or an internal...

Diving deep into the Face API

The Face API has two main features. The first one is face detection and the other is face recognition.

Face detection allows us to detect up to 64 faces in one image. We have already seen the basic usage. The features of face recognition are implied in its name: using it, we can detect whether two faces belong to the same person. We can find similar faces, or one in particular, and we can group similar faces. We will learn how to do all of this in the following sections.

When calling any of the APIs, it will respond with one of the following responses:

Code	Description
`200`	Successful call. It returns an array containing data related to the API call.
`400`	Request body is invalid. This can be a number of errors, depending on the API call. Typically, the request code is invalid.
`401`	Access denied because of an invalid subscription key. The key may be wrong or the account/subscription plan may be blocked.
`403`	Out of call volume data. You have made...

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Key benefits

Build applications with computer vision, speech recognition, and language processing capabilities
Process and analyze data in the form of text, images, and videos
Build smarter applications in Visual Studio using real-world examples

Description

Microsoft Cognitive Services is a set of APIs for integrating artificial intelligence in your applications to solve logical business problems. If you’re new to developing applications with AI, Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services will give you a comprehensive introduction to Microsoft’s AI stack and get you up-to-speed in no time. The book introduces you to 24 APIs, including Emotion, Language, Vision, Speech, Knowledge, and Search. Using Visual Studio, you can develop applications with enhanced capabilities for image processing, speech recognition, text processing, and much more. Moving forward, you will work with datasets that enable your applications to process various data in the form of image, video, or text. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to confidently explore Cognitive Services APIs for building intelligent applications that can be deployed for real-world business uses.

Who is this book for?

If you’re a developer or machine learning enthusiast who wants to get started with building intelligent applications, this book is for you. Though you’re not expected to have much programming experience, some knowledge of .NET and Visual Studio will help you undertake the tasks explained in this book easily.