Understand Foundry Tools for computer vision

  • 3 minutes

Azure AI provides a wide range of cloud-based services for various AI tasks, including computer vision. Microsoft's Azure Vision service provides prebuilt and customizable computer vision models that are based on deep learning models and provide various capabilities. Azure Vision provides "off-the-shelf" functionality for many common computer vision scenarios, while retaining the ability to create custom models using your own images.

Azure Vision service contains several products. Within Azure Vision, there are services that handle specific sets of tasks including:

  • Azure Vision Image Analysis service: Detects common objects in images, tags visual features, generates captions, and supports optical character recognition (OCR). Screenshot of image captioning example from Microsoft Foundry.

  • Azure AI Face service: Detects, recognizes, and analyzes human faces in images. Provides specific models for facial analysis that extend beyond what is available with image analysis. Screenshot of face detection example from Microsoft Foundry.

There are many applications for Azure Vision's image analysis and face detection, analysis, and recognition. For example:

  • Search engine optimization - using image tagging and captioning for essential improvements in search ranking.
  • Content moderation - using image detection to help monitor the safety of images posted online.
  • Security - facial recognition can be used in building security applications, and in operating systems for unlocking devices.
  • Social media - facial recognition can be used to automatically tag known friends in photographs.
  • Missing persons - using public cameras systems, facial recognition can be used to identify if a missing person is in the image frame.
  • Identity validation - useful at ports of entry kiosks where a person holds a special entry permit.
  • Museum archive management - using optical character recognition to preserve information from paper documents.

Note

Many modern vision solutions are built with a combination of capabilities. For example, video analysis capabilities are supported by Azure AI Video indexer. Azure AI Video indexer is built on several Foundry Tools, such as Face, Translator, Image Analysis, and Speech.

Next, let's take a look at some core Azure Vision Image Analysis capabilities.