The Most Popular Image Analytics APIs For Developers

Gone are those days when sorting thousands and thousands of pictures of our loved ones was tedious. In the digital era today, we click and capture a moment and let AI do the task of sorting and saving them. Image analytics has truly changed digital image processing and the market is booming with several new application programming interfaces in 2022. An image analytic has now become part of our daily lives where our devices identify people faster than we can recall. Digging further down the same tangent, in this blog we will take a look at what image analytics is and some of the popular image analysis APIs developers are making use of in 2023.

What is Image Analytics?

The concept of image analytics brims from machine learning as it is the automatic extraction and logical analysis of information found in an image through the technique of digital image processing. In image analytics the image is processed into fundamental components to extract meaningful information. Employing image analytics one can streamline and automate tasks like finding shapes, removing noise, detecting edges, counting objects, and calculating statistics for texture analysis or image quality. With bombardment of image data in unstructured data, constituting as much as 80% of the same, there is an acute need for an analytical system that can interpret images. The most popularly used instance of image analytics is use of barcode and QR code scanners. In fact it has become a part of our daily lives with smartphones possessing AI enabled facial recognition features. This important stem of machine learning has a critical role in commercial scape, medical, automobile, retail, mass media and biology. From medical image analysis to self-driving cars, analyzing brand logo, social media monitoring to detecting species and plants, image analytics has an emerging role to play.

Now that we have our fair idea of image analytics, let us move ahead to know about the most popular image analytics APIs in status quo.

Most Popular Image Analytics APIs for Web Developers in 2023

Google Goggles (Google Lens)

Google Goggles is the earliest image recognition mobile application, which is now further propelling as Google Lens. Officially launched in 2017, this AI powered computer vision tool helps one identify text, landmarks, location and even pull up information from websites efficiently. In addition to that it also works as a barcode and QR code scanner.

Google Cloud Vision API

A powerful image analysis service that helps one in understanding the content of images, Google Cloud Vision API is popular in the developers circuit. It extracts high-level features powered by cutting-edge machine learning models in an easy-to-use REST API framework. It is best known for classifying images into thousands of categories, detecting individual objects and facing within images. Moreover it also effectively finds and reads printed words contained within images. Therefore developers and startups interested in image recognition tasks use the API for free for 1,000 images per month.

Microsoft Azure Computer Vision API

Microsoft Azure Computer Vision is a powerful API best known for analyzing images, tagging and identifying content in the image and labeling it to Optical character recognition (OCR), which is for reading text in images and extracting the recognized words into a machine-readable character stream. It allows developers to access an advanced algorithm and it is available for free trial too.

Watson Visual Recognition

Watson Visual Recognition enables accessing insights effectively for the visual content by analyzing images for scenes, objects, faces, colors, food, and other subjects. In addition to that one can also create and train your custom image classifiers.

Amazon Rekognition

Gaining popularity amongst developers for providing a host of features such as sentiment analysis and scene detection, Amazon Rekognition is one of the most popular APIs in recent times, as the global tech giant extends robust suite for facial analysis tools, such as face recognition across images, and even drills down to the minute details such as face quality and facial comparison.

Bottom Line

When information comes in all forms and sizes, these popular image analytics APIs help developers to achieve complex image processing. With most applications having a critical need for image processing, be it for uploading profile photos, or storing photographs, or need to use images for interpretation and analysis, these popular image analytics APIs are here to aid web application development and mobile app development in 2023.