Image classification with Azure Cognitive Services (and C#)

Albert Starreveld
6 min readFeb 13, 2023

I live next to the park and every summer pizza-delivery guys keep ringing my doorbell to deliver pizza for people in the park. So I figured I’ll train my doorbell to recognise them and disable the doorbell as soon as it identifies one. To do so, I needed image classification. This blogpost describes how to choose the proper tool and how to implement it to do that.

To build image classification you don’t need to know much about machine learning anymore. Image classification is a common problem and you can use standard SaaS services to solve such problems in any cloud.

In Azure there are two interesting services that might do the job:

  • Azure Computer Vision
  • Azure Custom Vision

Read this blogpost to learn the basics of image classification, what services you can use, and how you can implement them in your solution.

How does Image Classification work?

To get a computer to recognise objects in a picture, you’ll need to train the computer. This simply means you must provide a number of pictures that show the object you are trying to identify from different perspectives. The more, the better.

TensorFlow and Neural Networks

If you want to get a better understanding of how image classification works, you can build image classification with TensorFlow. TensorFlow is a free…

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Albert Starreveld

Passionate about cloud native software development. Only by sharing knowledge and code can we take software development to the next level!