Contours – bounding box, minimum area rectangle, and minimum enclosing circle

Finding the contours of a square is a simple task; irregular, skewed, and rotated shapes bring the best out of the cv2.findContours utility function of OpenCV. Let's take a look at the following image:

In a real-life application, we would be most interested in determining the bounding box of the subject, its minimum enclosing rectangle, and its circle. The cv2.findContours function in conjunction with a few other OpenCV utilities makes this very easy to accomplish:

import cv2
import numpy as np

img = cv2.pyrDown(cv2.imread("hammer.jpg", cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED))

ret, thresh = cv2.threshold(cv2.cvtColor(img.copy(), cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) , 127, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
image, contours, hier = cv2.findContours(thresh, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)

for c in contours:
  # find bounding box coordinates
  x,y,w,h = cv2.boundingRect(c)
  cv2.rectangle(img, (x,y), (x+w, y+h), (0, 255, 0), 2)

  # find minimum area...