BarChartAnalyzer: Digitizing Images of Bar Charts

Komal Dadhich, Siri Daggubati, Jaya Sreevalsan-Nair

2021

Abstract

Charts or scientific plots are widely used visualizations for efficient knowledge dissemination from datasets. However, these charts are predominantly available in image format. There are various scenarios where these images are interpreted in the absence of datasets used initially to generate the charts. This leads to a pertinent need for data extraction from an available chart image. We narrow down our scope to bar charts and propose a semi-automated workflow, BarChartAnalyzer, for data extraction from chart images. Our workflow integrates the following tasks in sequence: chart type classification, image annotation, object detection, text detection and recognition, data table extraction, text summarization, and optionally, chart redesign. Our data extraction uses second-order tensor fields from tensor voting used in computer vision. Our results show that our workflow can effectively and accurately extract data from images of different resolutions and of different subtypes of bar charts. We also discuss specific test cases where BarChartAnalyzer fails. We conclude that our work is an effective and special image processing application for interpreting charts.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Dadhich K., Daggubati S. and Sreevalsan-Nair J. (2021). BarChartAnalyzer: Digitizing Images of Bar Charts. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing and Vision Engineering - Volume 1: IMPROVE, ISBN 978-989-758-511-1, pages 17-28. DOI: 10.5220/0010408300170028

in Bibtex Style

@conference{improve21,
author={Komal Dadhich and Siri Daggubati and Jaya Sreevalsan-Nair},
title={BarChartAnalyzer: Digitizing Images of Bar Charts},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing and Vision Engineering - Volume 1: IMPROVE,},
year={2021},
pages={17-28},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010408300170028},
isbn={978-989-758-511-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing and Vision Engineering - Volume 1: IMPROVE,
TI - BarChartAnalyzer: Digitizing Images of Bar Charts
SN - 978-989-758-511-1
AU - Dadhich K.
AU - Daggubati S.
AU - Sreevalsan-Nair J.
PY - 2021
SP - 17
EP - 28
DO - 10.5220/0010408300170028