How to extract Data Point from any Plot — Beginners Edition
While doing research as a student, we often have to extract data points from different plots published in literature either for comparing our own findings or for presenting them in a nicely presentable way in group meeting rather directly copy from the original source. Here i have found some following source which are fairly easy to use for extracting the data points from .jpeg/.png image file of any graph.
- WebPlotDigitizer: One of the best tool to extract the underlying data from any figure.
It is a semi-automated app, where you just have to load your image, set the axis scales. It can fairly extract the data points by itself, or if you want to specify certain point, it will additionally extract its values. The good thing of this app is that it is free.
Here is following tutorial, in which all the details about it has been described:
2. Digitizer tool Origin: If you are in academia or an independent researcher and usually publish in different scientific journals, then you might use some good plotting software just to get a better quality plot for your paper. And, Origin is one of the best plotting software for scientific graphing and data analysis with some advanced feature. The 8.5, 8.6, 9.0 and 9.1 version provides the digitizer tool for capturing data from images of graph. Though it is not free, the student license is around ~70 bucks, it’s worth of investing. So if you have origin in your lab, then you might also want to to watch the following tutorial about extracting data using the digitizer tool of origin.
The above two tool were for extracting data from the images of graph. However, if you have some MATLAB figure, you can also use the following code to extract the data directly, without reproducing the results.
open(‘0p1dpa.fig’); [Name of the figure]
h = findobj(gca,’Type’,’line’)
x=get(h,’Xdata’)
y=get(h,’Ydata’)
plot (x,y)
This procedure only works with .fig file. You need to copy your figure inside the active directory and then run this code. Once the extraction is done, you will be able to see it on the right that data has been extracted. I have used this a lot for transferring my plot from MATLAB to Origin for scatter and linear plots. But not sure how to do it for bar plot.
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