Image descriptions

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Azure AI Vision can analyze an image and generate a human-readable phrase that describes its contents. The service returns several descriptions based on different visual features, and each description is given a confidence score. The final output is a list of descriptions ordered from highest to lowest confidence.

English is the only supported language for image descriptions.

Image description example

The following JSON response illustrates what the Analyze Image API returns when describing the example image based on its visual features.

A black and white picture of buildings in Manhattan

{
   "description":{
      "tags":[
         "outdoor",
         "city",
         "white"
      ],
      "captions":[
         {
            "text":"a city with tall buildings",
            "confidence":0.48468858003616333
         }
      ]
   },
   "requestId":"7e5e5cac-ef16-43ca-a0c4-02bd49d379e9",
   "metadata":{
      "height":300,
      "width":239,
      "format":"Png"
   },
   "modelVersion":"2021-05-01"
}

Use the API

The image description feature is part of the Analyze Image API. You can call this API through a native SDK or through REST calls. Include Description in the visualFeatures query parameter. Then, when you get the full JSON response, parse the string for the contents of the "description" section.

Next steps

Learn the related concepts of tagging images and categorizing images.