How to crop an image in OpenCV using Python

Question

How can I crop images, like I\'ve done before in PIL, using OpenCV.

Working example on PIL

im = Image.open(\'0.png\').convert(\'L\')
im = im.crop((1         


        

Answer 1

Note that, image slicing is not creating a copy of the cropped image but creating a pointer to the roi. If you are loading so many images, cropping the relevant parts of the images with slicing, then appending into a list, this might be a huge memory waste.

Suppose you load N images each is >1MP and you need only 100x100 region from the upper left corner.

Slicing:

X = []
for i in range(N):
    im = imread('image_i')
    X.append(im[0:100,0:100]) # This will keep all N images in the memory. 
                              # Because they are still used.

Alternatively, you can copy the relevant part by .copy(), so garbage collector will remove im.

X = []
for i in range(N):
    im = imread('image_i')
    X.append(im[0:100,0:100].copy()) # This will keep only the crops in the memory. 
                                     # im's will be deleted by gc.

After finding out this, I realized one of the comments by user1270710 mentioned that but it took me quite some time to find out (i.e., debugging etc). So, I think it worths mentioning.