Generating a thumbnail image from a larger image sounds easy – just shrink the dimensions of the original, right? But it becomes more complicated if the thumbnail image is a different shape than the original. For example, the original image may be rectangular but we need the new image to be a square. Or we may need to generate a portrait-oriented thumbnail from a landscape-oriented original image. In these cases, we will need to crop or distort the original image when we create the thumbnail. Distorting the image tends to look very bad; and when we crop an image, we want ensure that the primary subject of the image remains in the generated thumbnail. To do this, we need to identify the primary subject of the image. That's easy enough for a human observer to do, but a difficult thing for a computer to do. But if we want to automate this process, we will have to ask the computer to do exactly that.

This is where machine learning can help. By analyzing many images, Machine Learning can figure out what parts of a picture are likely to be the main subject. Once this is known, it becomes a simpler matter to crop the picture in such a way that the main subject remains in the generated thumbnail.

As I discussed in a previous article, Microsoft Cognitive Services includes a set of APIs that allow your applications to take advantage of Machine Learning in order to analyze, image, sound, video, and language.

The Cognitive Services Vision API uses Machine Learning so that you don't have to. It exposes a web service to return an intelligent thumbnail image from any picture.

You can see this in action here.

Scroll down the the section titled "Generate a thumbnail" to see the Thumbnail generator as shown in Figure 1. 

Th01
Figure 1

With this live, in-browser demo, you can either select an image from the gallery and view the generated thumbnails; or provide your own image - either from your local computer or from a public URL. The page uses the Thumbnail API to create thumbnails of 6 different dimensions.
 
For your own application, you can either call the REST Web Service directly or (for a .NET application) use a custom library. The library simplifies development by abstracting away HTTP calls via strongly-typed objects.

To get started, you will need an Azure account and a Cognitive Services Vision API key.

If you don't have an Azure account, you can get a free one at https://azure.microsoft.com/free/.

Once you have an Azure Account,  follow the instructions in this article to generate a Cognitive Services Computer Vision key.

     

To use this API, you simply have to make a POST request to the following URL:
https://[location].api.cognitive.microsoft.com/vision/v1.0/generateThumbnail?width=ww&height=hh&smartCropping=true

where [location] is the Azure location where you created your API key (above) and ww and hh are the desired width and height of the thumbnail to generate.

The “smartCropping” parameter tells the service to determine the main subject of the photo and to try keep it in the thumbnail while cropping.

The HTTP header of the request should include the following:

Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key.     
The Cognitive Services Computer Vision key you generated above.

Content-Type

This tells the service how you will send the image. The options are:   

  • application/json    
  • application/octet-stream    
  • multipart/form-data

If the image is accessible via a public URL, set the Content-Type to application/json and send JSON in the body of the HTTP request in the following format

{"url":"imageurl"}
where imageurl is a public URL pointing to the image. For example, to generate a thumbnail of this picture of a skier, submit the following JSON:

{"url":"http://mezzotint.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2013-skier-edge-01-Kopie.jpg"}

Man skiing  alps

If you plan to send the image itself to the web service, set the content type to either "application/octet-stream" or "multipart/form-data" and submit the binary image in the body of the HTTP request.

Here is a sample console application that uses the service to generate a thumbnail from a file on disc. You can download the full source code at
https://github.com/DavidGiard/CognitiveSvcsDemos

Note: You will need to create the folder "c:\test" to store the generated thumbnail.

   

             // TODO: Replace this value with your Computer Vision API Key
            string computerVisionKey = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

            var client = new HttpClient();
            var queryString = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(string.Empty);

            client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key", computerVisionKey);

            queryString["width"] = "300";
            queryString["height"] = "300";
            queryString["smartCropping"] = "true";
            var uri = "https://westcentralus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/vision/v1.0/generateThumbnail?" + queryString;

            HttpResponseMessage response;

            string originalPicture = "/content/Giard/_DGInAppleton.png";
            var jsonBody = "{'url': '" + originalPicture + "'}";
            byte[] byteData = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(jsonBody);

            using (var content = new ByteArrayContent(byteData))
            {
                 content.Headers.ContentType = new MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json");
                response = await client.PostAsync(uri, content);
            }       
            if (response.StatusCode == System.Net.HttpStatusCode.OK)
            {
                 // Write thumbnail to file
                var responseContent = await response.Content.ReadAsByteArrayAsync();
                 string folder = @"c:\test";
                string thumbnaileFullPath = string.Format("{0}\\thumbnailResult_{1:yyyMMddhhmmss}.jpg", folder, DateTime.Now);
                using (BinaryWriter binaryWrite = new BinaryWriter(new FileStream(thumbnaileFullPath, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write)))
                 {
                    binaryWrite.Write(responseContent);
                }
                // Show BEFORE and AFTER to user
                Process.Start(thumbnaileFullPath);
                 Process.Start(originalPicture);
                Console.WriteLine("Done! Thumbnail is at {0}!", thumbnaileFullPath);
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Error occurred. Thumbnail not created");
             }

        }            

The result is shown in Figure 2 below.
Th02Results
Figure 2

One thing to note. The Thumbnail API is part of the Computer Vision API. As of this writing, the free version of the Computer Vision API is limited to 5,000 transactions per month. If you want more than that, you will need to upgrade to the Standard version, which charges $1.50 per 1000 transactions.

But this should be plenty for you to learn this API for free and build and test your applications until you need to put them into production.
The code above can be found on GitHub.

You can find the full documentation – including an in-browser testing tool - for this API here.

The Cognitive Services Custom Vision API provides a simple way to generate thumbnail images from pictures.