Title: Scatteract: Automated extraction of data from scatter plots,
Abstract: Charts are an excellent way to convey patterns and trends in data, but they
do not facilitate further modeling of the data or close inspection of
individual data points. We present a fully automated system for extracting the
numerical values of data points from images of scatter plots. We use deep
learning techniques to identify the key components of the chart, and optical
character recognition together with robust regression to map from pixels to the
coordinate system of the chart. We focus on scatter plots with linear scales,
which already have several interesting challenges. Previous work has done fully
automatic extraction for other types of charts, but to our knowledge this is
the first approach that is fully automatic for scatter plots. Our method
performs well, achieving successful data extraction on 89% of the plots in our
test set.