extracting boxes from tambola ticket failed to separate 8th and 9th column

[thisisnottaken]

Please see attached image and output is

My aim is to extract each box then read a number from it if it is not empty .
Can you suggest ?

Thanks.

[KananVyas]

Hey, great problem statement. As you can see the 8th and 9th columns are bit blurry. What you can try is:

1. Try resizing the kernels for dilation/erosion. Use (3,3) instead of (5,5)
2. Before applying any processing. lower the brightness of the image.

[thisisnottaken]

After saving my input file as 41.jpg and creating empty Images and Output folder
I am simply running

python src\box_detection.py

It seems you are already using 3x3 kernel in your code . I changed it to
kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (5, 5))
but found no difference in output .
Can you suggest code change to lower brightness of image ?

Thanks.