Environmental data extraction from multimedia resources

Extraction and analysis of environmental information is very important, since it strongly affects everyday life. Nowadays there are already many free services providing environmental information in several formats including multimedia (e.g. map images). Although such presentation formats might be very informative for humans, they complicate the automatic extraction and processing of the underlying data. A very characteristic example is the air quality and pollen forecasts, which are usually encoded in image maps of heterogeneous formats, while the initial (numerical) pollutant concentrations, calculated by a relevant model, remain unavailable. This work proposes a framework for the semi-automatic extraction of such information based on a template configuration tool, on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques and on methodologies for data reconstruction from images. The system is tested with a different air quality and pollen forecast heatmaps demonstrating promising results.