PLOTCON 2017: Ankit Rohatgi, Reverse engineering chart data with WebPlotDigitizer

A large quantity of useful data is available only in the form of graphical visualizations. It is often necessary to reverse engineer these images to obtain the underlying numerical values, but most existing tools for data extraction are tedious and error prone. WebPlotDigitizer is an opensource, web-based tool developed to make the process of data extraction easier and more accurate. This tool can be used with a variety of plot types such as two-dimensional XY plots, bar graphs, polar diagrams and ternary diagrams. The included sub-pixel level accurate curve and data point extraction algorithms can be used to extract data points or curves of a specific color in the desired region of interest. Distance and angle measurement tools can be used with microscope images or maps with scales. Extracted data can be exported directly to Plotly for analysis such as curve-fitting or re-visualization. WebPlotDigitizer is free to use and also available as a desktop application and an R package, which has made it a popular tool used in hundreds of published studies to date.

Biography
Ankit Rohatgi is the author of WebPlotDigitizer, a popular tool to extract data from images. Ankit developed this tool with the image processing techniques that he mastered while analyzing fluid-particle interaction experiments during his PhD work at the University of Notre Dame. Presently, Ankit is working as a senior software developer at ANSYS, Inc. developing structural analysis and fluid dynamics softwares. In his spare time, Ankit likes to explore scientific analysis techniques, machine learning and openscience tools.