Cartooning an Image using OpenCV – Python

Instead of sketching images by hand we can use OpenCV to convert a image into cartoon image. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to turn any image into a cartoon. We will apply a series of steps like:

1. Smoothing the image (like a painting)
2. Detecting edges (like a sketch)
3. Combining both to get a cartoon effect

Step 1: Install Required Library

Install OpenCV if it’s not already installed:

pip install opencv-python

Step 2: Read the Image

We start by reading the input image using cv2.imread(). You can download the input image from here.

import cv2
from google.colab.patches import cv2_imshow  

img = cv2.imread("Screenshot.png") 

if img is None:
    print("Error: Could not load image. Check the file path.")
else:
    cv2_imshow(img) 

Output:

Original Imgae

Step 3: Convert to Grayscale

Cartoon images depend on edges so we convert the image to grayscale first.

gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)

Step 4: Apply Median Blur

We smooth the grayscale image to remove noise and make edge detection cleaner.

gray_blur = cv2.medianBlur(gray, 5)

Step 5: Detect Edges using Adaptive Thresholding

This will highlight the edges in the image and give it a sketch-like effect.

edges = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(gray_blur, 255,
                              cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_MEAN_C,
                              cv2.THRESH_BINARY,
                              blockSize=9, C=9)

Step 6: Smooth the Original Image Using Bilateral Filter

This filter smooths the image while preserving the edges and give it a cartoon-like appearance.

color = cv2.bilateralFilter(img, d=9, sigmaColor=250, sigmaSpace=250)

Step 7: Combining Edges with Smoothed Image

Now we combine the sketch (edges) and smooth image using bitwise AND to create the final cartoon effect. We display final cartoon image and save it.

cartoon = cv2.bitwise_and(color, color, mask=edges)
cv2_imshow(cartoon)    

cv2.imwrite("cartoon_output.jpg", cartoon)

cv2.waitKey(0)
cv2.destroyAllWindows()

Output:

Cartoon Output Image

Turning an image into a cartoon using Python and OpenCV is fun and a good way to learn how image processing works. In this project we used a few smart filters to smooth colors, detect edges and combine them to get cartoon effect.

You can download source code from here.

kartik

Follow

Improve

Article Tags :

• AI-ML-DS
• Project