An AI technique that identifies and locates specific objects within images or video streams, assigning labels and confidence scores. Like teaching a computer to spot and name things it sees, from cats and cars to defects in manufacturing. Cloud services like AWS Rekognition, Azure Computer Vision, Google Cloud Vision, and OCI Vision make it easy to add this capability to applications without building AI models from scratch.
A security company uses object detection in AWS Rekognition to monitor surveillance feeds and automatically detect when someone enters a restricted area or if a fire is starting. The system identifies people, vehicles, and safety hazards in real-time, triggering instant alerts to security personnel so they can respond immediately.
All four clouds offer managed computer vision APIs for detecting and localizing objects in images (and, in some cases, video). AWS Rekognition and Google Vertex AI Vision provide strong video-oriented options; Azure commonly combines Azure AI Vision for prebuilt detection with Custom Vision for custom models; OCI Vision provides prebuilt and custom image detection capabilities.