How do I isolate handwritten text from an image using OpenCV and Python?

How do I isolate or crop only the handwritten text using OpenCV and Phyton for the image:

I have tried to use:

cv2.findContours

but because of the noise (background and dirty in paper) I can't get only the paper.

How do I do this?

To smooth noisy images, typical methods are to apply some type of blurring filter. For instance cv2.GaussianBlur(), cv2.medianBlur(), or cv2.bilaterialFilter() can be used to remove salt/pepper noise. After blurring, we can threshold to obtain a binary image then perform morphological operations. From here, we can find contours and filter using aspect ratio or contour area. To crop the ROI, we can use Numpy slicing

Detected text

Extracted ROI

Code

import cv2

image = cv2.imread('1.jpg')
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
blur = cv2.medianBlur(gray, 5)
thresh = cv2.adaptiveThreshold(blur,255,cv2.ADAPTIVE_THRESH_GAUSSIAN_C, cv2.THRESH_BINARY_INV,11,8)

kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (5,5))
dilate = cv2.dilate(thresh, kernel, iterations=6)
cnts = cv2.findContours(dilate, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE)
cnts = cnts[0] if len(cnts) == 2 else cnts[1]
cnts = sorted(cnts, key=cv2.contourArea, reverse=True)

for c in cnts:
    x,y,w,h = cv2.boundingRect(c)
    ROI = image[y:y+h, x:x+w]
    cv2.imwrite('ROI.png', ROI)
    break

cv2.imshow('thresh', thresh)
cv2.imshow('dilate', dilate)
cv2.imshow('ROI', ROI)
cv2.waitKey()