When I first started experimenting with this project I ran into several difficulties with using the Visual Recognition service. After much debugging and some much appreciated help from IBM Cloud support, it was determined that the project code that I was using was using an older version of the cloud API. 

To resolve the issues I was seeing, it was necessary to upgrade the Watson service to the latest version using the following command:

# --- Upgrade Watson Developer
!pip install --upgrade "watson-developer-cloud>-2.8.0"

The preceding command generates the following output:

To validate that the service was upgraded, you should see the following message:

Successfully installed watson-developer-cloud-2.8.0 websocket-client-0.48.0

Once the service was upgraded, all of the issues I was previously experiencing were resolved.