AI-900 Practice Question: Describe features of computer vision workloads on Azure
A logistics company needs to automatically read shipping labels on packages. The labels contain printed text in various fonts and sizes, as well as handwritten addresses. Which Azure Computer Vision capability should they use to extract the text from the labels?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Image Analysis (which can detect text in images but not extract it reliably from mixed formats) with the dedicated OCR Read API, or they mistakenly think Custom Vision can be trained for text extraction when it is designed for custom visual patterns.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - Read API
The Read API (part of Azure Computer Vision's OCR capabilities) is specifically designed to extract printed and handwritten text from images, handling varied fonts, sizes, and styles. This makes it the correct choice for reading shipping labels that contain both printed text and handwritten addresses.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Image Analysis
Why it's wrong here
Image Analysis (part of Azure AI Vision) is engineered for visual content understanding: it identifies objects, tags, captions, and landmarks in an image. On a shipping label, it might recognize a rectangular object or box, but its primary output is not a transcription of the written address or tracking number. Because the requirement is to read text, this service does not meet the need.
- ✗
Face API
Why it's wrong here
Face API is strongly specialized: its pre-built models detect human faces, landmarks, attributes like age/emotion, and perform face recognition/verification. Shipping labels are inanimate documents and contain no facial features, so the service cannot even run a meaningful analysis on them. It has no OCR capability and is therefore tangential to extracting text from labels.
- ✓
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - Read API
Why this is correct
The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - Read API is the correct choice: it is a dedicated OCR engine within Azure AI Vision designed to extract printed and handwritten text from images and PDFs. It handles varied fonts, low-contrast labels, skewed orientations, and returns structured line/word results with confidence scores, which are directly usable to populate tracking and address fields.
- ✗
Custom Vision
Why it's wrong here
Custom Vision lets you train a bespoke model to classify entire images or detect specific objects, such as identifying whether a package contains a shipping label or locating the label's bounding box. However, it does not provide general text extraction; you would need to pair it with a separate OCR component to actually read the label. Since the Read API already performs accurate, out-of-the-box OCR, Custom Vision is unnecessary and off-target.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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Azure Machine Learning Studio
Key term
Computer vision
Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to interpret and make decisions based on visual data from the world, such as images and videos.
Key term
OCR
Optical Character Recognition is technology that converts images of text, like scanned documents or photos, into machine-readable text data.
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