Why is the drawContour() in OpenCV generating this strange Mask?

edit savecancel

I started by reading in a Mat.

Then I converted it to Greyscale and applied Imgproc.canny() to it, getting the following mask.

Then I used Imgproc.findContours() to find the contours, Imgproc.drawContours(), and Core.putText() to label the contours with numbers

Then I did Rect boundingRect = Imgproc.boundingRect(contours.get(0)); Mat submatrix = new Mat(); submatrix = originalMat.submat(boundingRect); to get following submatrix:

So far so good. The Problem starts hereafter:

NOW I NEEDED A MASK OF THE submatrix. So I decided to use Imgproc.drawContours() to get the mask:

Mat mask = new Mat(submatrix.rows(), submatrix.cols(), CvType.CV_8UC1);
        List<MatOfPoint> contourList = new ArrayList<>();
        contourList.add(contours.get(0));
        Imgproc.drawContours(mask, contourList, 0, new Scalar(255), -1);

I got the following mask:

WHAT I WAS EXPECTING was a filled (in white color) diamond shape on black background.

WHy am I getting this unexpected result?