Horizontal Line detection with OpenCV

Question

I am trying to find horizontal and vertical lines from an image which came from a \"document\". The documents are scanned pages from contracts and so the lines look like wha

Answer 1

Here's a complete OpenCV solution using morphological operations.

• Obtain binary image
• Create horizontal kernel and detect horizontal lines
• Create vertical kernel and detect vertical lines

---

Here's a visualization of the process. Using this input image:

Binary image

import cv2

# Load image, convert to grayscale, Otsu's threshold
image = cv2.imread('1.png')
result = image.copy()
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
thresh = cv2.threshold(gray, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV + cv2.THRESH_OTSU)[1]

Detected horizontal lines highlighted in green

# Detect horizontal lines
horizontal_kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (40,1))
detect_horizontal = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, horizontal_kernel, iterations=2)
cnts = cv2.findContours(detect_horizontal, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
cnts = cnts[0] if len(cnts) == 2 else cnts[1]
for c in cnts:
    cv2.drawContours(result, [c], -1, (36,255,12), 2)

Detected vertical lines highlighted in green

# Detect vertical lines
vertical_kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (1,10))
detect_vertical = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, vertical_kernel, iterations=2)
cnts = cv2.findContours(detect_vertical, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
cnts = cnts[0] if len(cnts) == 2 else cnts[1]
for c in cnts:
    cv2.drawContours(result, [c], -1, (36,255,12), 2)

Result

Here's the output using another input image

Input -> Binary -> Detected Horizontal -> Detected Vertical -> Result

---

Note: Depending on the image, you may have to modify the kernel size. For instance to capture longer horizontal lines, it may be necessary to increase the horizontal kernel from (40, 1) to say (80, 1). If you wanted to detect thicker horizontal lines, then you could increase the width of the kernel to say (80, 2). In addition, you could increase the number of iterations when performing cv2.morphologyEx(). Similarly, you could modify the vertical kernels to detect more or less vertical lines. There is a trade-off when increasing or decreasing the kernel size as you may capture more or less of the lines. Again, it all varies depending on the input image

Full code for completeness

import cv2

# Load image, convert to grayscale, Otsu's threshold
image = cv2.imread('1.png')
result = image.copy()
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image,cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
thresh = cv2.threshold(gray, 0, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV + cv2.THRESH_OTSU)[1]

# Detect horizontal lines
horizontal_kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (40,1))
detect_horizontal = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, horizontal_kernel, iterations=2)
cnts = cv2.findContours(detect_horizontal, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
cnts = cnts[0] if len(cnts) == 2 else cnts[1]
for c in cnts:
    cv2.drawContours(result, [c], -1, (36,255,12), 2)

# Detect vertical lines
vertical_kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (1,10))
detect_vertical = cv2.morphologyEx(thresh, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, vertical_kernel, iterations=2)
cnts = cv2.findContours(detect_vertical, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
cnts = cnts[0] if len(cnts) == 2 else cnts[1]
for c in cnts:
    cv2.drawContours(result, [c], -1, (36,255,12), 2)

cv2.imshow('result', result)
cv2.waitKey()