You may want to use the ndarray.item method, as in a.item(). This is also equivalent to (the now deprecated) np.asscalar(a). This has the benefit of working in situations with views and superfluous axes, while the above solutions will currently break. For example,

>>> a = np.asarray(1).view()
>>> a.item()  # correct
1

>>> a[0]  # breaks
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
IndexError: too many indices for array


>>> a = np.asarray([[2]])
>>> a.item()  # correct
2

>>> a[0]  # bad result
array([2])

This also has the benefit of throwing an exception if the array is not actually a scalar, while the a[0] approach will silently proceed (which may lead to bugs sneaking through undetected).

>>> a = np.asarray([1, 2])
>>> a[0]  # silently proceeds
1
>>> a.item()  # detects incorrect size
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: can only convert an array of size 1 to a Python scalar

Generally your idea of trying to apply astype to each column is fine.

In [590]: X[:,0].astype(int)
Out[590]: array([1, 2, 3, 4, 5])

But you have to collect the results in a separate list. You can't just put them back in X. That list can then be concatenated.

In [601]: numlist=[]; obj_ind=[]

In [602]: for ind in range(X.shape[1]):
   .....:     try:
   .....:         x = X[:,ind].astype(np.float32)
   .....:         numlist.append(x)
   .....:     except:
   .....:         obj_ind.append(ind)

In [603]: numlist
Out[603]: [array([ 3.,  4.,  5.,  6.,  7.], dtype=float32)]

In [604]: np.column_stack(numlist)
Out[604]: 
array([[ 3.],
       [ 4.],
       [ 5.],
       [ 6.],
       [ 7.]], dtype=float32)

In [606]: obj_ind
Out[606]: [1]

X is a numpy array with dtype object:

In [582]: X
Out[582]: 
array([[1, 'A'],
       [2, 'A'],
       [3, 'C'],
       [4, 'D'],
       [5, 'B']], dtype=object)

You could use the same conversion logic to create a structured array with a mix of int and object fields.

In [616]: ytype=[]

In [617]: for ind in range(X.shape[1]):
    try:                        
        x = X[:,ind].astype(np.float32)
        ytype.append('i4')
    except:
        ytype.append('O')       

In [618]: ytype
Out[618]: ['i4', 'O']

In [620]: Y=np.zeros(X.shape[0],dtype=','.join(ytype))

In [621]: for i in range(X.shape[1]):
    Y[Y.dtype.names[i]] = X[:,i]

In [622]: Y
Out[622]: 
array([(3, 'A'), (4, 'A'), (5, 'C'), (6, 'D'), (7, 'B')], 
      dtype=[('f0', '<i4'), ('f1', 'O')])

Y['f0'] gives the the numeric field.

You can't modify the dtype of a slice only. When you do

images[0:5] = images[0:5].astype(numpy.float32)

images[0:5].astype(numpy.float32) creates a float copy of your slice, but the result is converted back to int when assigned back to the images slice since images is of dtype int.

What you could do is create a temporary copy of your slice and convert it to float:

copied_slice = images[0:5].astype(numpy.float32)

do all the computation you need on this smaller part of your data, save whatever result you need, then move on to the next (copied and converted) slice.