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

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)

Inspired by Thomas Weller's answer, you can also use np.fromfile() to read the image and convert it to ndarray and then use cv2.imdecode() to decode the array into a three-dimensional numpy ndarray (suppose this is a color image without alpha channel):

import numpy as np

# img is in BGR format if the underlying image is a color image
img = cv2.imdecode(np.fromfile('测试目录/test.jpg', dtype=np.uint8), cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED)

np.fromfile() will convert the image on disk to numpy 1-dimensional ndarray representation. cv2.imdecode can decode this format and convert to the normal 3-dimensional image representation. cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED is a flag for decoding. Complete list of flags can be found here.

PS. For how to write image to a path with unicode characters, see here.