Figureseer: Parsing result-figures in research papers

Abstract

‘Which are the pedestrian detectors that yield a precision above 95% at 25% recall?’ Answering such a complex query involves identifying and analyzing the results reported in figures within several research papers. Despite the availability of excellent academic search engines, retrieving such information poses a cumbersome challenge today as these systems have primarily focused on understanding the text content of scholarly documents. In this paper, we introduce FigureSeer, an end-to-end framework for parsing result-figures, that enables powerful search and retrieval of results in research papers. Our proposed approach automatically localizes figures from research papers, classifies them, and analyses the content of the result-figures. The key challenge in analyzing the figure content is the extraction of the plotted data and its association with the legend entries. We address this challenge by formulating a novel graph-based reasoning approach using a CNN-based similarity metric. We present a thorough evaluation on a real-word annotated dataset to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.