Use the Read API

3 minutes

To use the Read OCR feature, call the ImageAnalysis function (REST API or equivalent SDK method), passing the image URL or binary data, and optionally specifying a gender neutral caption or the language the text is written in (with a default value of en for English).

To make an OCR request to ImageAnalysis, specify the visual feature as READ.

ImageAnalysisResult result = client.Analyze(
    <image-to-analyze>,
    VisualFeatures.Read);

Python

result = client.analyze(
    image_url=<image_to_analyze>,
    visual_features=[VisualFeatures.READ]
)

If using the REST API, specify the feature as read.

https://<endpoint>/computervision/imageanalysis:analyze?features=read&...

The results of the Read OCR function are returned synchronously, either as JSON or the language specific object of a similar structure. These results are broken down in blocks (with the current service only using one block), then lines, and then words. Additionally, the text values are included at both the line and word levels, making it easier to read entire lines of text if you don't need to extract text at the individual word level.

{
    "metadata":
    {
        "width": 500,
        "height": 430
    },
    "readResult":
    {
        "blocks":
        [
            {
                "lines":
                [
                    {
                        "text": "Hello World!",
                        "boundingPolygon":
                        [
                            {"x":251,"y":265},
                            {"x":673,"y":260},
                            {"x":674,"y":308},
                            {"x":252,"y":318}
                        ],
                        "words":
                        [
                            {
                                "text":"Hello",
                                "boundingPolygon":
                                [
                                    {"x":252,"y":267},
                                    {"x":307,"y":265},
                                    {"x":307,"y":318},
                                    {"x":253,"y":318}
                                ],
                            "confidence":0.996
                            },
                            {
                                "text":"World!",
                                "boundingPolygon":
                                [
                                    {"x":318,"y":264},
                                    {"x":386,"y":263},
                                    {"x":387,"y":316},
                                    {"x":319,"y":318}
                                ],
                                "confidence":0.99
                            }
                        ]
                    },
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

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