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)