C2F-CHART: A Curriculum Learning Approach to Chart Classification
This work addresses chart accessibility for scientific research by providing an incremental improvement to chart classification pipelines.
The paper tackles the problem of chart classification to improve chart accessibility by introducing C2F-CHART, a coarse-to-fine curriculum learning approach that outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the ICPR 2022 dataset.
In scientific research, charts are usually the primary method for visually representing data. However, the accessibility of charts remains a significant concern. In an effort to improve chart understanding pipelines, we focus on optimizing the chart classification component. We leverage curriculum learning, which is inspired by the human learning process. In this paper, we introduce a novel training approach for chart classification that utilizes coarse-to-fine curriculum learning. Our approach, which we name C2F-CHART (for coarse-to-fine) exploits inter-class similarities to create learning tasks of varying difficulty levels. We benchmark our method on the ICPR 2022 CHART-Infographics UB UNITEC PMC dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art results.