Introduction

  • 5 minutes

You're the leader of a group of climate scientists who are concerned about the dwindling polar bear population in the Arctic. To help address the problem, your team has placed hundreds of motion-activated cameras at strategic locations throughout the region. Instead of manually examining each photo that's taken to determine whether it contains a polar bear, your challenge is to devise an automated system that processes data from these cameras in real time and displays an alert on a map when one of your cameras photographs a polar bear. You need a solution that uses AI to determine with a high degree of accuracy whether a photo contains a polar bear. And, you need it fast, because climate change won't wait.

In this module, you'll use Microsoft Azure AI services to build your automated system. Specifically, you'll use:

  • Azure Blob Storage to store photos
  • The Azure AI Custom Vision service to analyze photos to determine whether they include polar bears
  • Azure Functions to pass each photograph that's uploaded to Blob Storage to the Custom Vision service
  • Azure SQL Database as a data source
  • Power BI to build a dashboard to visualize results

The dashboard will show in green the locations where your cameras capture polar bears and other wildlife activity in red.

Screenshot of a live map of Cornwallis Island with camera activity data listed.

Learning objectives

In the following units, you'll deploy several Azure services and integrate them to form an end-to-end solution. The final result will be a Power BI report that depicts where an array of virtual cameras is photographing polar bears. Along the way, you'll learn:

  • How to create an Azure Storage account and upload blobs to it
  • How to write a function app in Azure Functions that's triggered when a blob is uploaded to storage
  • How to use Azure AI Custom Vision to train a machine learning model to recognize polar bears in a dataset of images
  • How to invoke a Custom Vision model from a function app
  • How to create a SQL database in Azure SQL Database, and then write records to it
  • How to connect Power BI to a SQL database
  • How to create a report that has informative visuals in Power BI

Prerequisites