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Reverse‐Engineering Visualizations: Recovering Visual Encodings from Chart Images
Author(s) -
Poco Jorge,
Heer Jeffrey
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/cgf.13193
Subject(s) - computer science , chart , pipeline (software) , artificial intelligence , bitmap , convolutional neural network , set (abstract data type) , visualization , encoding (memory) , data mining , pattern recognition (psychology) , information retrieval , programming language , statistics , mathematics
Abstract We investigate how to automatically recover visual encodings from a chart image, primarily using inferred text elements. We contribute an end‐to‐end pipeline which takes a bitmap image as input and returns a visual encoding specification as output. We present a text analysis pipeline which detects text elements in a chart, classifies their role (e.g., chart title, x‐axis label, y‐axis title, etc.), and recovers the text content using optical character recognition. We also train a Convolutional Neural Network for mark type classification. Using the identified text elements and graphical mark type, we can then infer the encoding specification of an input chart image. We evaluate our techniques on three chart corpora: a set of automatically labeled charts generated using Vega, charts from the Quartz news website, and charts extracted from academic papers. We demonstrate accurate automatic inference of text elements, mark types, and chart specifications across a variety of input chart types.