Image processing based data extraction from graphical representation

Raw data is commonly presented in graphical form in published literature. Often authors may be in need to source data from such publications. The raw research data is normally not available to fellow researchers due to non availability of data itself or lack of interest of the author to share the data. Presently many software tools are available for extracting the data from the graphs. But the user has to manually select the points where the data is to be extracted. Few automation features provided in the tools are time consuming and need post processing to eliminate the errors in data extraction. An image processing based algorithm is developed to automatically extract the data from the graphs with minimal inputs by the user. The tests on the developed tool shows that the extracted data is close to the raw data with error less than 1%. The results are motivating enough to upgrade the developed algorithm with more features.