How do I read an image from a path with Unicode characters?

Question

I have the following code and it fails, because it cannot read the file from disk. The image is always None.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import cv2
import numpy

bgrImage = cv2.imread(u'D:\\ö\\handschuh.jpg')

Note: my file is already saved as UTF-8 with BOM. I verified with Notepad++.

In Process Monitor, I see that Python is acccessing the file from a wrong path:

I have read about:

• Open file with unicode filename, which is about the open() function and not related to OpenCV.
• How do I read an image file using Python, but that's unrelated to Unicode issues.

Answer 1

It can be done by

• opening the file using open(), which supports Unicode as in the linked answer,
• read the contents as a byte array,
• convert the byte array to a NumPy array,
• decode the image

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import cv2
import numpy

stream = open(u'D:\\ö\\handschuh.jpg', "rb")
bytes = bytearray(stream.read())
numpyarray = numpy.asarray(bytes, dtype=numpy.uint8)
bgrImage = cv2.imdecode(numpyarray, cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED)

or (as mentioned in the comments, thanks to jdhao):

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import cv2
import numpy

bgrImage = cv2.imdecode(np.fromfile(u'D:\\ö\\handschuh.jpg', np.uint8), cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED)