Chart Classification Using Siamese CNN

Abstract

In recovering information from the chart image, the first step should be chart type classification. Throughout history, many approaches have been used, and some of them achieve results better than others. The latest articles are using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) in combination with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which achieve almost perfect results with the datasets of few thousand images per class. The datasets containing chart images are primarily synthetic and lack real-world examples. To overcome the problem of small datasets, to our knowledge, this is the first report of using Siamese CNN architecture for chart type classification. Multiple network architectures are tested, and the results of different dataset sizes are compared. The network verification is conducted using Few-shot learning (FSL). Many of described advantages of Siamese CNNs are shown in examples. In the end, we show that the Siamese CNN can work with one image per class, and a 100% average classification accuracy is achieved with 50 images per class, where the CNN achieves only average classification accuracy of 43% for the same dataset.

Keywords

• chart classification
• chart image processing
• data visualization
• Siamese neural network
• image processing and computer vision