Effortless Text Extraction with Azure AI Vision SDK: A Beginner’s Guide

In today’s data-driven world, extracting text from images is a crucial feature for automating workflows, digitizing documents, and building AI-driven applications. Azure AI Vision, with its powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities, makes this task seamless. Whether you need to extract text from scanned documents, receipts, or handwritten notes, it provides an accurate and scalable solution.

In this post, we will learn more about how to leverage Azure AI vision service using sdk to extract text from images

Introduction to Azure AI Vision

It is a part of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services suite, designed to analyze visual content like images and videos. It offers various capabilities, such as:

• Text Extraction (OCR): Recognize and extract printed or handwritten text.
• Image Analysis: Detect objects, faces, and other visual elements.
• Spatial Analysis: Understand movement and interactions in physical spaces.

For text extraction, AI Vision’s OCR is highly effective for digitizing information from a variety of sources.

Key Features for Text Extraction

• Supports Multiple Formats: Works with images, scanned documents, and PDFs.
• Multi-language Capability: Recognizes text in over 120 languages.
• Handwriting Recognition: Extracts handwritten text with high accuracy.
• Cloud Integration: Scalable and easily integrates with other Azure services.

Pre-requisite

1. Create An Azure AI Services Multi-Service account and copy & Save the Key and Endpoint details we will use in the further steps.

Step-by-Step : Extract Text from Images Using Azure AI Vision SDK

1. Open the palette in the terminal run a Git: Clone command to clone mslearn-ai-vision repository to a local folder.

   Git clone https://github.com/MicrosoftLearning/mslearn-ai-vision
   
   

   

2. Wait while the Additional files are installed , After successfully installed expand the Labfiles section to check the Files.
3. In the Explorer pane, browse to the Labfiles\05-ocr folder and expand the C-Sharp or Python folder depending on your language preference. And enter below command to Install the packages related to AI-Vision image analysis.

   pip install azure-ai-vision-imageanalysis==1.0.0b1
   

   

4. Now Replace the Service endpoint and Service Key from Azure ai service multi services account we created before.
5. Replace the key and Endpoint. After providing values make sure to save the modified file
6. Import namespaces

   # import namespaces
   from azure.ai.vision.imageanalysis import ImageAnalysisClient
   from azure.ai.vision.imageanalysis.models import VisualFeatures
   from azure.core.credentials import AzureKeyCredential
   

   

7.  Find the comment Authenticate Azure AI Vision client. Then, under the comment, add the following language-specific code to create and authenticate an Azure AI Vision client.

   # Authenticate Azure AI Vision client
   cv_client = ImageAnalysisClient(
       endpoint=ai_endpoint,
       credential=AzureKeyCredential(ai_key)
   )
   

   

8. No we need add code for analyze and image for tags. Find the comment Use Analyze image function to read text in image and Add the Code snippet.
9. GitHub URL For the Code : Read Text in Images
10. To return the text Which is extracted from image we need to write a Code snippet from which the the text that is extracted from image based on the input we provide it will return the text in the detected image.
11. Enter a number from which image you want to extract the text.
12. The text has been extracted successfully.
13. You can also check whether the Text extracted from the image is Accurate or not by clicking on the image that you have provided input to fetch the output from the image.
14. You can also Extract text from hand-written images Using azure ai-vision.

Best Practices for Text Extraction

• High-Quality Images : Use high-resolution images for better accuracy.
• Preprocessing : Enhance images using tools like OpenCV for resizing or noise reduction.
• Specify Language : Use language parameters in API calls to improve recognition accuracy.
• Handle Multi-Line Text : Utilize bounding box data to reconstruct multi-line text efficiently.

To know more about : Microsoft Azure Chatbot Using Cognitive and Bot services

Conclusion

Azure AI simplifies the process of extracting text from images, empowering developers to build innovative solutions with minimal effort. Its OCR capabilities, combined with Azure’s robust ecosystem, make it a perfect choice for tasks ranging from document digitization to advanced AI-driven workflows.

Whether you’re a developer, data scientist, or enterprise user, it opens new doors to automate and innovate. Start today by leveraging AI Vision in your applications and experience the power of AI-driven text extraction.

Frequently Asked Questions