Chapter 3. Analyzing Videos

In the previous chapter, we looked at different APIs for processing images. We are going to cover one new API: the Video Indexer API.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• General overview of Video Indexer

• Guide to Video Indexer using the prebuilt UI

Diving into Video Indexer

Video Indexer is a service that allows you to upload videos and gain insights from the videos that you upload. These insights can be used to make videos (and by extension your content) more discoverable. They can also be used to improve user engagement.

General overview

Using artificial intelligence technologies, Video Indexer enables you to extract a great deal of information. It can gain insights from the following list of features:

• Audio transcript, with language detection

• Creation of closed captions

• Noise reduction

• Face tracking and identification

• Speaker indexing

• Visual-text recognition

• Voice-activity detection

• Scene detection

• Keyframe extraction

• Sentiment analysis

• Translation

• Visual-content moderation

• Keyword extraction

• Annotations

• Detection of brands

• Object and action labeling

• Textual-content moderation

• Emotion detection

Typical scenarios

The following list shows a few typical scenarios where one might want to use Video Indexer:

• Search: If you have a library of videos, you can...

Unlocking video insights using Video Indexer

In this section, we will look at how to use Video Indexer.

How to use Video Indexer

We are going to take a quick look at how you can utilize Video Indexer.

Through a web portal

To use the prebuilt Video Indexer tool from Microsoft, head over to https://vi.microsoft.com/. Sign up or log in with your Microsoft account. When you have signed in, you will be asked to register the account by filling out some information, as shown in the following screenshot:

Once you have logged in, you will find yourself at a dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot:

To get started, you can upload your videos by clicking on Upload. This will open a popup that you can use to either upload a video or enter a URL to a video. Alternatively, you can get started quickly by selecting a sample video by clicking on Sample Videos in the menu.

When you have chosen a video, or when the video you have uploaded has completed its indexing, you will be taken to a page to see the insights...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered Video Indexer. We started with a general overview, learning what Video Indexer is. We then learned how to analyze videos in the Video Indexer web application. We ended the chapter by looking at how to sign up for the REST API, allowing us to utilize the power of Video Indexer in our own applications.

In the next chapter, we will move away from the vision APIs and into the first language API. You will learn how to configure the API to understand intent in sentences, using the power of LUIS.