Network Programming in .NET

Assuming you have an Azure account, if you open up a Computer vision service under Cognitive Services, and grab an API key, you can use Azure to recognise the content of images. – Great for tagging images in blogs, or making sure nobody uploads a nude pic as their profile image on your website – For which you should check out AvatarApi.com for this!

So, lets see some code – I’m using C#, and Newtonsoft to parse the Json;

const string strUrl = “https://westeurope.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/vision/v1.0/analyze?visualFeatures=Tags”;
var wc = new WebClient();
wc.Headers[“Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key”] = “xxxxxxx”;
var jPost = new { url = Url };
var strPost = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(jPost, Formatting.Indented);
var strJson = wc.UploadString(strUrl, “POST”, strPost);
var jResult = JObject.Parse(strJson);

Depending on your image of course, this will return JSON similar to the following;

{
  "tags": [
    {
      "name": "car",
      "confidence": 0.99999725818634
    },
    {
      "name": "outdoor",
      "confidence": 0.99585741758347
    },
    {
      "name": "transport",
      "confidence": 0.82641708850861
    },
    {
      "name": "blue",
      "confidence": 0.51219713687897
    },
    {
      "name": "roof",
      "confidence": 0.091790720820427
    },
    {
      "name": "automotive",
      "confidence": 0.01434036432286
    },
    {
      "name": "summer",
      "confidence": 0.0078773201327271
    }
  ],
  "requestId": "e0010f8b-189f-4481-ad02-5b71b3ac2b2b",
  "metadata": {
    "width": 1600,
    "height": 1200,
    "format": "Jpeg"
  }
}