Playing with Microsoft Cognitive Services

It’s time for a little fun – inspired by Martin Kearn‘s talk at DDDNorth I fired up the Microsoft Cognitive Services Website, signed up and got myself a key for the emotion API. It didn’t take me long to get up and running!

I tried briefly using the SDK library but found some trouble with strongly typed names, deciding the abandon that approach I used the method Martin recommends on his blog and simply downloaded the json myself and parsed it.

Here’s my code:

        var _apiUrl = @"https://api.projectoxford.ai/emotion/v1.0/recognize";

        using (var httpClient = new HttpClient())
        {
          httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key", _apiKey);
          httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Add(new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/octet-stream"));

          //setup data object
          HttpContent content = new StreamContent(new MemoryStream(File.ReadAllBytes(filename)));
          content.Headers.ContentType = new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/octet-stream");

          //make request
          var response = await httpClient.PostAsync(_apiUrl, content);

          //read response and write to view
          var responseContent = response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;
          var objResponse = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<RootObject[]>(responseContent);

          var image = Image.FromFile(filename);
          using (var gfx = Graphics.FromImage(image))
          {
            foreach (var face in objResponse)
            {
              gfx.DrawRectangle(new Pen(Color.Red, 5),
                new Rectangle(new Point(face.faceRectangle.left, face.faceRectangle.top),
                  new Size(face.faceRectangle.width, face.faceRectangle.height)));

              var text = this.GetText(face.scores);

              gfx.DrawString(text, new Font(FontFamily.GenericSerif, 64), new SolidBrush(Color.Red),
                face.faceRectangle.left + 24,
                face.faceRectangle.height + face.faceRectangle.top);
            }
          }
          this.pictureBox1.Image = image;
        }

I’m very impressed with how easy it is (in fact most of it’s being used to update the picture box in my little Winforms app!).

What do you think? Do I look about 65% surprised?