Cognitive Services Pricing—Computer Vision API

Computer Vision API

• What are the different operations that you can accomplish with Computer Vision API?

  Please refer to the documentation for more detailed descriptions of these operations.

  • Tag—Computer Vision API returns tags based on more than 2,000 recognizable objects, living beings, scenery, and actions. In cases where tags may be ambiguous or not common knowledge, the API response provides “hints” to clarify the meaning of the tag.
  • Face—Detects human faces within a picture
  • GetThumbnail—After an image is uploaded, GetThumbnail generates a high-quality thumbnail. The Computer Vision API algorithm analyzes the objects within the image, then crops the image to fit the requirements of the region of interest (ROI).
  • Color—The Computer Vision algorithm extracts colors from an image. The colors are analyzed in three different contexts: foreground, background, and whole. The colors are grouped into 12 dominant accent colors.
  • Image Type—Computer Vision API can set a Boolean flag to indicate whether an image is black and white or color, as well as use the same method to indicate whether an image is a line drawing or not. Image Type also indicates whether an image is clipart or not, and the quality.
  • OCR—Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology detects text content in an image. The identified text is extracted into a machine-readable character stream for search and numerous other purposes, ranging from medical records to security and banking. It automatically detects the language. OCR saves time and provides convenience for users by allowing them to simply take photos of text instead of transcribing it. Please refer to Documentation for supported languages.
  • Adult—Apply the adult/racy settings to enable automated restriction of adult content in images.
  • Celebrity—Azure’s celebrity recognition model recognizes 200,000 celebrities from business, politics, sports, and entertainment around the world.
  • Analyze—Call multiple operations at once. Specify which functions you want to run and the API will run all of these together. Each operation included in “Analyze” will be counted as a separate transaction.
• What constitutes a transaction for Computer Vision API?

  For Recognize Text each POST call counts as a transaction. All GET calls to see the results of the async service are counted as transactions but are free of charge. For all other operations, each feature call counts as a transaction, whether called independently or grouped through the Analyze call. Analyze calls are used to make calling the API easier, but each feature used counts as a transaction. For instance an Analyze call containing Tag, Face, and Adult would count as three transactions.

  Please refer to the documentation for the complete list and detailed descriptions of operations.

• What will my bill look like?

  Each operation that you call (either individually or through “Analyze”) will be counted as a transaction. The total bill will be based on the number of transactions for each type of operation within a monthly billing period.

  As a specific example, let’s say you make the following calls in a certain monthly billing period:

  • 1,500,000 Analyze operations, each calling both Tag and Describe operations
  • 500,000 OCR operations
  • 4,000,000 Recognize Text operations

  Your total bill will be constructed as follows:

  Operations	Calculations
  1,500,000 Tag and 1,500,000 Face operations:	First 1,000,000 transactions: $-/1000 * 1,000,000 = $- Remaining 2,000,000 transactions: $-/1000 * 2,000,000 = $-
  500,000 OCR operations:	$-/1000 * 500,000 = $-
  1,500,000 Describe and 4,000,000 Recognize Text operations:	$-/1000 * 5,500,000 = $-
  Total	$-

General

• How does billing for the Bing Search APIs work?

  Bing Search APIs are invoiced based on number of transactions (also known as API calls). These plans are pay-as-you-go and doesn’t incur additional cost for complex queries and more than 10 results (up to 50 results in most cases).

• What happens if I exceed number of transactions per second (TPS) for a given tier?

  If you happen to exceed the mentioned number of transactions per second (TPS), your usage will be throttled to be within the mentioned limit. If your application needs to have higher TPS than the ones mentioned on this page, please reach out to the Azure support team.

• What constitutes a transaction for the Bing Search APIs?

  For billing purposes, a transaction is a successful Bing API call request (though there are caveats for DoS attacks). For logging and reporting purposes such as for the Bing Statistics Add-in, it is any Bing API call irrespective of whether it is successful or not.

• Can I change the tier of service I subscribed to?

  You can change the tier of service anytime. Please make sure you use appropriate keys in your API calls. If you are having enterprise agreement with Microsoft, please work with your account executive.