PlotPick: AI-powered batch extraction of numerical data from scientific figures

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Carstensen, Tommy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914539300192256
author Carstensen, Tommy
author_facet Carstensen, Tommy
contents Systematic reviews and meta-analyses frequently require numerical data that authors report only as figures, yet manual digitisation is slow and does not scale. We present PlotPick, an open-source tool that uses vision-language models (VLMs) to batch-extract structured tabular data from scientific figures. We evaluate six VLMs from three providers on two established chart-to-table benchmarks (ChartX and PlotQA) and compare against the dedicated chart-to-table model DePlot. All six VLMs outperform DePlot on both benchmarks. On ChartX (restricted to bar charts, line charts, box plots, and histograms; n=300), VLMs achieve 88-96% recall versus 71% for DePlot. On PlotQA (n=529), VLMs achieve 86-99% RMSF1 versus 94% for DePlot. The gap is largest on chart types absent from the dedicated models' training data: on box plots, DePlot achieves 24% RMSF1 while VLMs achieve 83-97%. PlotPick is available at https://plotpick.streamlit.app.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PlotPick: AI-powered batch extraction of numerical data from scientific figures
Carstensen, Tommy
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Digital Libraries
I.7.5; H.3.7; I.2.10
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses frequently require numerical data that authors report only as figures, yet manual digitisation is slow and does not scale. We present PlotPick, an open-source tool that uses vision-language models (VLMs) to batch-extract structured tabular data from scientific figures. We evaluate six VLMs from three providers on two established chart-to-table benchmarks (ChartX and PlotQA) and compare against the dedicated chart-to-table model DePlot. All six VLMs outperform DePlot on both benchmarks. On ChartX (restricted to bar charts, line charts, box plots, and histograms; n=300), VLMs achieve 88-96% recall versus 71% for DePlot. On PlotQA (n=529), VLMs achieve 86-99% RMSF1 versus 94% for DePlot. The gap is largest on chart types absent from the dedicated models' training data: on box plots, DePlot achieves 24% RMSF1 while VLMs achieve 83-97%. PlotPick is available at https://plotpick.streamlit.app.
title PlotPick: AI-powered batch extraction of numerical data from scientific figures
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Digital Libraries
I.7.5; H.3.7; I.2.10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06021