Extraction and interpretation of charts in technical documents

The Information Extraction is a method for filtering information from large volumes of text. It includes the extraction of documents from collections and the tagging of particular terms in text. But non-text information such as graphs, images, figures, etc are common in any technical documents. Scientific charts are commonly used in graphical representation of statistical, experimental and technical data. These are the major visual aids for data analysis and are simple, clear and widely used. Image understanding is the research area concerned with the design and experimentation of computer systems that integrate models of a visual image problem domain. A system for recognition and interpretation of simple bar graphs is proposed. The system generates a natural language description based on semantic understanding. An approach for chart interpretation and conversion to natural language text is discussed. Chart interpretation processes graphical and textual components separately, and then it associates the graphical information to its corresponding textual data. The semantic meaning of the chart is presented in a natural language format.