Multimodal AI: Vision-Language Models in Practice
Image analysis, document understanding and multimodal prompts.
Taught by Rohan Maharjan · ML Engineer
What you'll learn
- Explain how vision-language models process images and where they are reliable or weak
- Send images and PDFs to a multimodal API from Python and control cost through image sizing
- Extract invoice and form fields into schema-validated JSON with structured outputs
- Read charts, tables and UI screenshots and answer questions across multiple images
- Build a small evaluation set and measure extraction accuracy before and after prompt changes
- Apply privacy, batching and caching practices to run multimodal extraction in production
About this course
Vision-language models let you send an image, a screenshot or a scanned PDF to an API and get back a description, an answer or clean structured data. That single capability is replacing brittle OCR pipelines and manual data entry across finance, logistics, healthcare admin and support. This intermediate course is for developers, data analysts and technical product people who want to build with multimodal AI rather than just demo it. You will make your first multimodal API call, extract fields from invoices and forms into validated JSON, read charts and screenshots, run visual question answering over several images, and build a small extraction pipeline with an evaluation set, cost controls and privacy safeguards. Examples use Python and the Anthropic API, with notes on OpenAI and Gemini equivalents. You should be comfortable with basic Python and have used a chat model API at least once.
Course content
6 lessons- 1What Vision-Language Models Can Actually SeeHow multimodal models work, what they are good and bad at, and how images are priced.Preview
- 2Your First Multimodal API CallSend an image from Python, ask a question, and understand the request shape across providers.
- 3OCR and Document UnderstandingRead scanned pages and PDFs, decide when classic OCR still wins and keep answers grounded.
- 4Invoice and Form Extraction With Structured OutputTurn invoices and forms into schema-validated JSON your systems can consume directly.
- 5Charts, Screenshots and Visual Question AnsweringRead charts into data, understand UI screenshots and answer questions across several images.
- 6Building a Reliable Extraction PipelineEvaluate accuracy on a golden set, control cost with batching and caching, and protect personal data.