title: Splitting up digits in images
body: <p>I've gotten access to a lot of reports which are filled out by hand. One of the columns in the report contains a timestamp, which I would like to attempt to identify without going through each report manually.</p>
  
  <p>I am playing with the idea of splitting the times, e.g. 00:30, into four digits, and running these through a classifier trained on MNIST to identify the actual timestamps.</p>
  
  <p>When I manually extract the four digits in Photoshop and run these through an MNIST classifier, it works perfectly. But so far I haven't been able to figure out how to programatically split the number sequences into single digits. I tried to use different types of countour finding in OpenCV, but it didn't work very reliably.</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions?</p>
  
  <p>I've <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/CpAyE.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">added a screenshot</a> of some of the relevant columns in the reports.</p>