Skip to main content
Log in

Handwriting-based gender and handedness classification using convolutional neural networks

  • 1166: Advances of machine learning in data analytics and visual information Processing
  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Demographical handwritings classification has many applications in various disciplines such as biometrics forensics, psychology, archeology, etc. Finding the best features for differentiating subclasses (e.g. men and women) is one of the major problems in handwriting based demographical classification. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) advanced models have a higher capacity in extracting appropriate features compared to traditional models. In this paper, the ability and capacity of deep CNNs in automatic classification of two handwriting based demographical problems, i.e. gender and handedness classification, have been examined by using advanced CNNs; DenseNet201, InceptionV3, and Xception. Two databases, IAM (English texts) and KHATT (Arabic texts) have been employed in this study. The achieved results showed that the proposed CNNs architectures performed well in improving classification results, with 84% accuracy (1.27% improvement) for gender classification using the IAM database, and 99.14% accuracy (28.23% improvement) for handedness classification using the KHATT database.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb

References

  1. Ahmed M, Rasool AG, Afzal H, Siddiqi I (2017) Improving handwriting based gender classification using ensemble classifiers. Expert Syst Appl 85:158–168

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Akbari Y, Nouri K, Sadri J, Djeddi C, Siddiqi I (2017) Wavelet-based gender detection on off-line handwritten documents using probabilistic finite state automata. Image Vis Comput 59:17–30

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Al Maadeed S, Hassaine A (2014) Automatic prediction of age, gender, and nationality in offline handwriting. EURASIP J Image Vid Process 2014(1):10

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Al-Maadeed S, Ferjani F, Elloumi S, Hassaine A (2013) Jaoua A automatic handedness detection from off-line handwriting. In: 2013 7th IEEE GCC Conference and Exhibition (GCC), IEEE, pp 119–124

  5. Al-Maadeed S, Ferjani F, Elloumi S, Jaoua A (2016) A novel approach for handedness detection from off-line handwriting using fuzzy conceptual reduction. EURASIP J Image Vid Process 2016(1):1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Bi N, Suen CY, Nobile N, Tan J (2019) A multi-feature selection approach for gender identification of handwriting based on kernel mutual information. Pattern Recogn Lett 121:123–132

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Borji A, Cheng M-M, Hou Q, Jiang H, LI J (2019) Salient object detection: a survey. Comput Vis Med 5(2):117–150

  8. Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2014) Local descriptors to improve off-line handwriting-based gender prediction. In: 2014 6th International Conference of Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR), IEEE, pp 43–47

  9. Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2015) Histogram of oriented gradients for writer's gender, handedness and age prediction. In: 2015 International Symposium on Innovations in Intelligent SysTems and Applications (INISTA), IEEE, pp 1–5

  10. Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2016) Robust soft-biometrics prediction from off-line handwriting analysis. Appl Soft Comput 46:980–990

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2016) Writer’s gender classification using HOG and LBP features. In: International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Control Applications, Springer, pp 317–325

  12. Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2017) Fuzzy integrals for combining multiple SVM and histogram features for writer's gender prediction. IET Biometrics 6(6):429–437

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Caligiuri MP, Mohammed LA (2012) The neuoscience of handwriting: applications for forensic document examination. CRC Press, London

  14. Chollet F (2017) Xception: Deep learning with depthwise separable convolutions. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 1251–1258

  15. Dorfberger S, Adi-Japha E, Karni A (2009) Sex differences in motor performance and motor learning in children and adolescents: an increasing male advantage in motor learning and consolidation phase gains. Behav Brain Res 198(1):165–171

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Francks C, DeLisi LE, Fisher SE, Laval SH, Rue JE, Stein JF, Monaco AP (2003) Confirmatory evidence for linkage of relative hand skill to 2p12-q11. Am J Hum Genet 72(2):499–501

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Gattal A, Djeddi C, Siddiqi I, Chibani Y (2018) Gender classification from offline multi-script handwriting images using oriented basic image features (oBIFs). Expert Syst Appl 99:155–167

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Huang G, Liu Z, Van Der Maaten L, Weinberger KQ (2017) Densely connected convolutional networks. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 4700–4708

  19. Illouz E, David EO, Netanyahu NS (2018) Handwriting-based gender classification using End-to-End deep neural networks. In: International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Springer, pp 613–621

  20. Kaljahi MA, Varshini PV, Shivakumara P, Pal U, Lu T, Guru D (2018) Word-wise handwriting based gender identification using multi-gabor response fusion. In: Workshop on Document Analysis and Recognition. Springer, Berlin, pp 119–132

    Google Scholar 

  21. Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Hinton GE (2012) Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. Advances in neural information processing systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 10997–1105

  22. Kushki A, Chau T, Anagnostou E (2011) Handwriting difficulties in children with autism spectrum disorders: a scoping review. J Autism Dev Disord 41(12):1706–1716

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Liu W, Wang Z, Liu X, Zeng N, Liu Y, Alsaadi FE (2017) A survey of deep neural network architectures and their applications. Neurocomputing 234:11–26

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Liwicki M, Bunke H (2005) IAM-OnDB-an on-line English sentence database acquired from handwritten text on a whiteboard. In: Eighth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR'05), IEEE, pp 956–961

  25. Liwicki M, Schlapbach A, Loretan P, Bunke H (2007) Automatic detection of gender and handedness from on-line handwriting. In: Proc. 13th Conf. of the Graphonomics Society, pp 179–183

  26. Liwicki M, Schlapbach A, Bunke H (2011) Automatic gender detection using on-line and off-line information. Pattern Anal Applic 14(1):87–92

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  27. Lu X, Ma C, Ni B, Yang X (2019) Adaptive region proposal with channel regularization for robust object tracking. IEEE Trans Circuits Syst Video Technol. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSVT.2019.2944654

  28. Lu X, Wang W, Shen J, Tai Y-W, Crandall DJ, Hoi SC (2020) Learning video object segmentation from unlabeled videos. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 8960–8970

  29. Mahmoud SA, Ahmad I, Al-Khatib WG, Alshayeb M, Parvez MT, Märgner V, Fink GA (2014) KHATT: an open Arabic offline handwritten text database. Pattern Recogn 47(3):1096–1112

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Mirza A, Moetesum M, Siddiqi I, Djeddi C (2016) Gender classification from offline handwriting images using textural features. In: 2016 15th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), IEEE, pp 395–398

  31. Morera Á, Sánchez Á, Vélez JF, Moreno AB (2018) Gender and handedness prediction from offline handwriting using convolutional neural networks. Complexity 2018:1–14

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  32. Navya B, Shivakumara P, Shwetha G, Roy S, Guru D, Pal U, Lu T (2018) Adaptive multi-gradient kernels for handwritting based gender identification. In: 2018 16th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), IEEE, pp 392–397

  33. Ponti MA, Ribeiro LSF, Nazare TS, Bui T, Collomosse J (2017) Everything you wanted to know about deep learning for computer vision but were afraid to ask. In: 2017 30th SIBGRAPI conference on graphics, patterns and images tutorials (SIBGRAPI-T), IEEE, pp 17–41

  34. Rosenblum S, Engel-Yeger B, Fogel Y (2013) Age-related changes in executive control and their relationships with activity performance in handwriting. Hum Mov Sci 32(2):363–376

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Schomaker L (2008) Writer identification and verification. In: Advances in Biometrics. Springer, Berlin, pp 247–264

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  36. Schröter A, Mergl R, Bürger K, Hampel H, Möller H-J, Hegerl U (2003) Kinematic analysis of handwriting movements in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, depression and healthy subjects. Dement Geriatr Cogn Disord 15(3):132–142

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Siddiqi I, Djeddi C, Raza A, Souici-Meslati L (2015) Automatic analysis of handwriting for gender classification. Pattern Anal Applic 18(4):887–899

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  38. Stenroos O (2017) Object detection from images using convolutional neural networks, Dissertation, University of Aalto

  39. Sze V, Chen Y-H, Yang T-J, Emer JS (2017) Efficient processing of deep neural networks: a tutorial and survey. Proc IEEE 105(12):2295–2329

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Szegedy C, Vanhoucke V, Ioffe S, Shlens J, Wojna Z (2016) Rethinking the inception architecture for computer vision. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 2818–2826

  41. Tan J, Bi N, Suen CY, Nobile N (2016) Multi-feature selection of handwriting for gender identification using mutual information. In: 2016 15th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), IEEE, pp 578–583

  42. Teulings H-L, Stelmach GE (1991) Control of stroke size, peak acceleration, and stroke duration in Parkinsonian handwriting. Hum Mov Sci 10(2–3):315–334

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Van Galen GP, Van Doorn RR, Schomaker LR (1990) Effects of motor programming on the power spectral density function of finger and wrist movements. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 16(4):755–765

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Xiao Z, Liu H, Zhou G, Zhu F, Jin H (2020) Behavioral features fusion for ethological CNN classification of open field test videos. Multimed Tools Appl. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-08858-x

  45. Zhang J, Fan D-P, Dai Y, Anwar S, Saleh FS, Zhang T, Barnes N (2020) UC-net: uncertainty inspired rgb-d saliency detection via conditional variational autoencoders. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, Seattle, pp 8582–8591

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mohammad Amin Shayegan.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Rahmanian, M., Shayegan, M.A. Handwriting-based gender and handedness classification using convolutional neural networks. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 35341–35364 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-10170-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-10170-7

Keywords

Navigation