Line Chart Understanding with Convolutional Neural Network

Visual understanding of the implied knowledge in line charts is an important task affecting many downstream tasks in information retrieval. Despite common use, clearly defining the knowledge is difficult because of ambiguity, so most methods used in research implicitly learn the knowledge. When building a deep neural network, the integrated approach hides the properties of individual subtasks, which can hinder finding the optimal configurations for the understanding task in academia. In this paper, we propose a problem definition for explicitly understanding knowledge in a line chart and provide an algorithm for generating supervised data that are easy to share and scale-up. To introduce the properties of the definition and data, we set well-known and modified convolutional neural networks and evaluate their performance on real and synthetic datasets for qualitative and quantitative analyses. In the results, the knowledge is explicitly extracted and the generated synthetic data show patterns similar to human-labeled data. This work is expected to provide a separate and scalable environment to enhance research into technical document understanding.