Dismantling Composite Visualizations in the Scientific Literature

Po-Shen Lee, Bill Howe

2015

Abstract

We are analyzing the visualizations in the scientific literature to enhance search services, detect plagiarism, and study bibliometrics. An immediate problem is the ubiquitous use of multi-part figures: single images with multiple embedded sub-visualizations. Such figures account for approximately 35% of the figures in the scientific literature. Conventional image segmentation techniques and other existing approaches have been shown to be ineffective for parsing visualizations. We propose an algorithm to automatically segment multi-chart visualizations into a set of single-chart visualizations, thereby enabling downstream analysis. Our approach first splits an image into fragments based on background color and layout patterns. An SVM-based binary classifier then distinguishes complete charts from auxiliary fragments such as labels, ticks, and legends, achieving an average 98.1% accuracy. Next, we recursively merge fragments to reconstruct complete visualizations, choosing between alternative merge trees using a novel scoring function. To evaluate our approach, we used 261 scientific multi-chart figures randomly selected from the Pubmed database. Our algorithm achieves 80% recall and 85% precision of perfect extractions for the common case of eight or fewer sub-figures per figure. Further, even imperfect extractions are shown to be sufficient for most chart classification and reasoning tasks associated with bibliometrics and academic search applications.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Lee P. and Howe B. (2015). Dismantling Composite Visualizations in the Scientific Literature . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 2: ICPRAM, ISBN 978-989-758-077-2, pages 79-91. DOI: 10.5220/0005213100790091

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icpram15,
author={Po-Shen Lee and Bill Howe},
title={Dismantling Composite Visualizations in the Scientific Literature},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 2: ICPRAM,},
year={2015},
pages={79-91},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005213100790091},
isbn={978-989-758-077-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 2: ICPRAM,
TI - Dismantling Composite Visualizations in the Scientific Literature
SN - 978-989-758-077-2
AU - Lee P.
AU - Howe B.
PY - 2015
SP - 79
EP - 91
DO - 10.5220/0005213100790091