Fred R. Barnard of Printers' Ink stated "A picture is worth ten thousand words".

But no one really knows what those words are. Here comes the Google Cloud Vision API to decipher that for us.

Cloud Vision API takes an image as input and spits out the contents of the image as text. It can understand the contents of the image. And this service can be accessed over REST API.

Before we continue with Cloud Vision API, I would recommend heading over to https://cloud.google.com/vision/ and trying out the API. Here is a quick glimpse of it as shown in the screenshot:

That is a photo of me when I was going through a trying-to-grow-long-hair phase, and after having fun at the beach. What is important is how the vision service was able to look at the image and detect my mood.

The same service can perform label detection as well as detect web entities related to this image among others.

Some of the key features of this service are:

• Detecting explicit content
• Detecting logos, labels, landmarks
• Landmark detection
• Optical character recognition
• Face detection
• Image attributes
• Integrated REST API

To find out more about Cloud Vision API, check this out: https://cloud.google.com/vision/.