Chart Mining: A Survey of Methods for Automated Chart Analysis

Charts are useful communication tools for the presentation of data in a visually appealing format that facilitates comprehension. There have been many studies dedicated to chart mining, which refers to the process of automatic detection, extraction and analysis of charts to reproduce the tabular data that was originally used to create them. By allowing access to data which might not be available in other formats, chart mining facilitates the creation of many downstream applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of approaches across all components of the automated chart mining pipeline, such as (i) automated extraction of charts from documents; (ii) processing of multi-panel charts; (iii) automatic image classifiers to collect chart images at scale; (iv) automated extraction of data from each chart image, for popular chart types as well as selected specialized classes; (v) applications of chart mining; and (vi) datasets for training and evaluation, and the methods that were used to build them. Finally, we summarize the main trends found in the literature and provide pointers to areas for further research in chart mining.