4. Working with contours

Activity 4.01: Identifying a Character on a Mirrored Document

Solution:

1. Open Jupyter Notebook. Go to File | New File. A new file will open. Save it as Activity4.01.ipynb.
2. Import the OpenCV library:

   import cv2

3. Read the image of the handwritten note as follows:

   image = cv2.imread('phrase_handwritten.png')

4. Save a copy of this image. You will mark the bounding box on this copy at the end of the activity:

   imagecopy= image.copy()

5. Convert the image to grayscale as follows:

   gray_image = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)

6. Now, convert the image into binary and display it as follows:

   ret,binary_im = cv2.threshold(gray_image,0,255,\
                                 cv2.THRESH_OTSU) 
   cv2.imshow('binary image', binary_im)
   cv2.waitKey(0) 
   cv2.destroyAllWindows()

   The preceding code...