Python: Find Amount of Handwriting in Video

Question

Do you know of an algorithm that can see that there is handwriting on an image? I am not interested in knowing what the handwriting says, but only that there is

Answer 1

In addition to the great answers that people provided, I have two other suggestions.

The first one, is the CNN methods. It's totally workable to use some object detection routine, or even a segmentation method (like U-NET) to differentiate between the texts. It is easy because you can find millions of images from digital text books and also handwritten documents to train your model.

The Second approach is to locate and to extract every single symbol on the image, separately (with a simple method like the one you used so far, or with connectedcomponent). Since typographic letters and symbols have a unique shape and style (similar fonts - unlike the handwritten letters) you can match all the found letters with sample typographic letters that you gathered separately to distinguish between the handwritten and the typographic. Feature-point-based matching (like SURF) could be a good tool for this approach.