How to straighten a rotated rectangle area of an image using OpenCV in Python?

The other methods will work only if the content of the rectangle is in the rotated image after rotation and will fail badly in other situations. What if some of the part are lost? See an example below:

If you are to crop the rotated rectangle text area using the above method,

import cv2
import numpy as np


def main():
    img = cv2.imread("big_vertical_text.jpg")
    cnt = np.array([
            [[64, 49]],
            [[122, 11]],
            [[391, 326]],
            [[308, 373]]
        ])
    print("shape of cnt: {}".format(cnt.shape))
    rect = cv2.minAreaRect(cnt)
    print("rect: {}".format(rect))

    box = cv2.boxPoints(rect)
    box = np.int0(box)

    print("bounding box: {}".format(box))
    cv2.drawContours(img, [box], 0, (0, 0, 255), 2)

    img_crop, img_rot = crop_rect(img, rect)

    print("size of original img: {}".format(img.shape))
    print("size of rotated img: {}".format(img_rot.shape))
    print("size of cropped img: {}".format(img_crop.shape))

    new_size = (int(img_rot.shape[1]/2), int(img_rot.shape[0]/2))
    img_rot_resized = cv2.resize(img_rot, new_size)
    new_size = (int(img.shape[1]/2)), int(img.shape[0]/2)
    img_resized = cv2.resize(img, new_size)

    cv2.imshow("original contour", img_resized)
    cv2.imshow("rotated image", img_rot_resized)
    cv2.imshow("cropped_box", img_crop)

    # cv2.imwrite("crop_img1.jpg", img_crop)
    cv2.waitKey(0)


def crop_rect(img, rect):
    # get the parameter of the small rectangle
    center = rect[0]
    size = rect[1]
    angle = rect[2]
    center, size = tuple(map(int, center)), tuple(map(int, size))

    # get row and col num in img
    height, width = img.shape[0], img.shape[1]
    print("width: {}, height: {}".format(width, height))

    M = cv2.getRotationMatrix2D(center, angle, 1)
    img_rot = cv2.warpAffine(img, M, (width, height))

    img_crop = cv2.getRectSubPix(img_rot, size, center)

    return img_crop, img_rot


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

This is what you will get:

Apparently, some of the parts are cut out! Why do not directly warp the rotated rectangle since we can get its four corner points with cv.boxPoints() method?

import cv2
import numpy as np


def main():
    img = cv2.imread("big_vertical_text.jpg")
    cnt = np.array([
            [[64, 49]],
            [[122, 11]],
            [[391, 326]],
            [[308, 373]]
        ])
    print("shape of cnt: {}".format(cnt.shape))
    rect = cv2.minAreaRect(cnt)
    print("rect: {}".format(rect))

    box = cv2.boxPoints(rect)
    box = np.int0(box)
    width = int(rect[1][0])
    height = int(rect[1][1])

    src_pts = box.astype("float32")
    dst_pts = np.array([[0, height-1],
                        [0, 0],
                        [width-1, 0],
                        [width-1, height-1]], dtype="float32")
    M = cv2.getPerspectiveTransform(src_pts, dst_pts)
    warped = cv2.warpPerspective(img, M, (width, height))

Now the cropped image becomes

Much better, isn't it? If you check carefully, you will notice that there are some black area in the cropped image. That is because a small part of the detected rectangle is out of the bound of the image. To remedy this, you may pad the image a little bit and do the crop after that. There is an example illustrated in this answer.

Now, we compare the two methods to crop the rotated rectangle from the image. This method do not require rotating the image and can deal with this problem more elegantly with less code.

Similar recipe for openCV version 3.4.0.

from cv2 import cv
import numpy as np

def getSubImage(rect, src):
    # Get center, size, and angle from rect
    center, size, theta = rect
    # Convert to int 
    center, size = tuple(map(int, center)), tuple(map(int, size))
    # Get rotation matrix for rectangle
    M = cv2.getRotationMatrix2D( center, theta, 1)
    # Perform rotation on src image
    dst = cv2.warpAffine(src, M, src.shape[:2])
    out = cv2.getRectSubPix(dst, size, center)
    return out

img = cv2.imread('img.jpg')
# Find some contours
thresh2, contours, hierarchy = cv2.findContours(img, cv2.RETR_TREE, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
# Get rotated bounding box
rect = cv2.minAreaRect(contours[0])
# Extract subregion
out = getSubImage(rect, img)
# Save image
cv2.imwrite('out.jpg', out)

This was a very frustrating endeavor, but finally I solved it based on rroowwllaanndd's answer. I just had to add the angle correction when the width < height. Without this I got very strange results for images which fulfilled this condition.

def crop_image(rect, image):
    shape = (image.shape[1], image.shape[0])  # cv2.warpAffine expects shape in (length, height)
    center, size, theta = rect
    width, height = tuple(map(int, size))
    center = tuple(map(int, center))
    if width < height:
        theta -= 90
        width, height = height, width

    matrix = cv.getRotationMatrix2D(center=center, angle=theta, scale=1.0)
    image = cv.warpAffine(src=image, M=matrix, dsize=shape)

    x = int(center[0] - width // 2)
    y = int(center[1] - height // 2)

    image = image[y : y + height, x : x + width]

    return image