What is the ImageModel in LangChain4j and which providers support image generation?

ImageModel is the LangChain4j interface for text-to-image generation — sending a text prompt and receiving a generated image in return. It follows the same provider-abstraction pattern as ChatLanguageModel: your code works against the interface, and the actual generation is delegated to whichever provider you configure.

public interface ImageModel {
    Response<Image> generate(String prompt);
    Response<List<Image>> generate(String prompt, int n);
    Response<Image> edit(Image image, String prompt);  // inpainting
    Response<Image> edit(Image image, Image mask, String prompt);
}

The Image response object contains either a URL to the generated image (hosted by the provider) or a Base64-encoded data URI, depending on the provider and configuration.

ImageModel model = OpenAiImageModel.builder()
    .apiKey(apiKey)
    .modelName(DALL_E_3)
    .size("1024x1024")
    .quality("standard")
    .build();

Response<Image> response = model.generate(
    "A serene Japanese zen garden at dawn, photorealistic");

String imageUrl = response.content().url().toString();
// or Base64: response.content().base64Data()

Supported image generation providers in LangChain4j:

• OpenAI DALL-E 2 / DALL-E 3 — Available via langchain4j-open-ai; DALL-E 3 supports higher quality and natural language understanding
• Azure OpenAI DALL-E — Via langchain4j-azure-open-ai for enterprise Azure deployments
• Stability AI — Via langchain4j-stability-ai for Stable Diffusion models

Note that ImageModel is a distinct interface from ChatLanguageModel. Multi-modal vision models that accept images as input (GPT-4V, Claude 3) are handled through ChatLanguageModel's message API using ImageContent, not through ImageModel.