Applying Computer Vision to Winter Wonderlands

Making holiday photos accessible for all with the Azure AI Vision v4 API

This article is my entry as part of Festive Tech Calendar 2023. Visit FestiveTechCalendar.com more articles in the series by other authors.

In this article I’ll walk you through using C# to work with the new v4 Image Analysis API Microsoft offers with Azure AI Vision.

Like the v3.2 API that came before it, the v4 computer vision API offers AI as a service capabilities to extract information from images on your hard drive or accessible over the internet. However, the analysis experience is even better with the v4 API and offers some interesting new capabilities including dense captioning, people detection, and background removal.

Let’s see how the computer vision capabilities can help analyze some pictures of winter wonderlands.

Note: Special thanks to those who sent me photos for this article, including those I couldn’t fit in. Special thanks go out to Sergio, Claudio Bernasconi, Peter O’Hanlon, Kit Eason, Pete Gallagher, and Sahed Chowdhuri

Connecting to Azure Resources

First, this article assumes you have either an Azure AI Services resource or an Azure AI Vision resource…