Abstract
Identification of a person on the basis of different characteristics is a prevailing area of research. Both behavioral biometrics and physical biometrics are used as measures to recognize a person’s identity. Physical biometrics includes fingerprints and IRIS patterns; whereas behavioral biometrics includes some sort of pattern in human activities like handwriting. Handwriting, like other biometrics, is one of the best attributes for implicitly identifying a person. Every person has a different style of handwriting. Gender prediction on the basis of handwriting styles in different Indian and non-Indian scripts offers a vast area for research and is an effective strategy for biometrics. This paper's major goal is to give an in-depth analysis of gender prediction using handwriting in non-Indic and Indic scripts. The intention is to provide a variety of feature extraction methods, datasets available, and a taxonomy of conventional and machine learning-based tools for gender prediction on the basis of handwriting. This article discusses the context, survey protocol, methodology, and various datasets used by the various researchers. The compiled study used for feature extraction and classification methods, along with a critical analysis of the work done, is also elaborated in this manuscript.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.Data availability
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
References
Ahmed AA, Sulong G (2014) Arabic writer identification: a review of literature. J Theor Appl Inf Technol 69:474–484
Ahmed M, Rasool AG, Afzal H, Siddiqi I (2017a) Improving handwriting-based gender classification using ensemble classifiers. Expert Syst Appl 85:158–168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2017.05.033
Ahmed AA, Hasan H, Hameed FA, Al-Sanjary OI (2017b) Writer identification on multi-script handwritten using optimum features. Science 2:178–185
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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.imavis.2016.11.017
Al Maadeed S, Ayouby W, Hassaïıne A, Aljaam JM (2012) QUWI: An arabic and english handwriting dataset for offline writer identification. In: Frontiers in handwriting recognition (ICFHR), international conference on, pp 746–751. IEEE
Al Maadeed S, Hassaine A (2014) Automatic prediction of age, gender, and nationality in offline handwriting. Eurasip J Image Video Proc 2014:1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-5281-2014-10
Beech J, Mackintosh IC (2005) Do differences in sex hormones affect handwriting style? Evidence from digit ratio and sex role identity as determinants of the sex of handwriting. Personality Individ Differ 39:459–468
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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2018.05.005
Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2016) Writer’s gender classification using HOG and LBP features. Lecture Notes Electr Eng 411:317–325. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48929-2_24
Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2016b) Robust soft-biometrics prediction from off-line handwriting analysis. Appl Soft Comput 46:980–990
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. https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-bmt.2016.0140
Bouadjenek, N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2014) Local descriptors to improve off-line handwriting-based gender prediction. In: 6th international conference on soft computing and pattern recognition, SoCPaR. pp 43–47. https://doi.org/10.1109/SOCPAR.2014
Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2015a) Histogram of Oriented Gradients for writer’s gender, handedness and age prediction. In: INISTA 2015a - 2015a international symposium on innovations in intelligent systems and applications, proceedings, pp 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1109/INISTA.2015.7276752
Bouadjenek N, Nemmour H, Chibani Y (2015b). Age, gender and handedness prediction from handwriting using gradient features. In: 2015b 13th international conference on document analysis and recognition (ICDAR), pp 1116–1120
Brink A, Niels R, van Batenburg R, van Den Heuvel C, Schomaker L (2010) Towards robust writer verification by correcting unnatural slant. Pattern Recognit Lett 32(3):449–457
Cao W, Xie Z, Zhou X, Xu Z, Zhou C, Theodoropoulos G, Wang Q (2020) A learning framework for intelligent selection of software verification algorithms. J Artif Intell 2(4):177
Cao W, Xie Z, Li J, Xu Z, Ming Z, Wang X (2021) Bidirectional stochastic configuration network for regression problems. Neural Netw 140:237–246
Chambers J, Yan W, Garhwal A, Kankanhalli M (2015) Currency security and forensics: a survey. Multimedia Tools and Applications 74(11):4013–4043
Dargan S, Kumar M (2019) Writer Identification System for Indic and Non-Indic Scripts: State-of-the-Art Survey. Archiv of Comput Methods Eng 26(4):1283–1311. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-018-9278-z
Dargan S, Kumar M, Garg A, Thakur K (2020) Writer identification system for pre-segmented offline handwritten Devanagari characters using k-NN and SVM. Soft Comput 24:10111–10122
Djeddi C, Madeed SA, Gattal A, Saddiqi I, Meslati LS, Abed HE (2016) ICFHR 2016 competition on multi-script writer demographics classification using ‘QUWI’ database. ICFHR, Hyderabad, pp 602–606
Djeddi C, Gattal A, Souici-Meslati L et al. (2014) ‘LAMIS-MSHD: a multiscript offline handwriting database’. In: Proc. Int. Conf. Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR), Heraklion, Greece, September, pp 93–97 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2014.23
Khalid S, Naqvi U, Siddiqi I (2015) Framework for human identification through offline handwritten documents. In: 2015 international conference on computer, communications, and control technology (I4CT), Kuching, Malaysia, pp 54–58, doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/I4CT.2015.7219536
Dargan S, Kumar M (2021) gender classification and writer identification system based on handwriting in gurumukhi script. In: 2021 international conference on computing, communication, and intelligent systems (ICCCIS), Greater Noida, India, pp 388–393, doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCIS51004.2021.9397201
Fiel S, Sablatnig R (2015) writer identification and retrieval using a convolutional neural network. In: Azzopardi G, Petkov N (eds) Computer analysis of images and patterns CAIP 2015. Lecture notes in computer science. Springer, Cham
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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2018.01.038
Gattal A, Djeddi C, Bensefia A, Ennaji A (2020) Handwriting based gender classification using cold and hinge features. Image and Signal Processing: 9th International Conference, ICISP 2020, Marrakesh, Morocco, June 4–6, 2020, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 233–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51935-3_25
Gideon SJ, Kandulna A, Kujur AA, Diana A, Raimond K (2018) Handwritten signature forgery detection using convolutional neural networks. Procedia Comput Sci 143:978–987. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.336
Grosicki E, Carre M, Brodin JM, Geoffrois E (2008) Rimes evaluation campaign for handwritten mail processing. 11th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition. Concordia University, Concordia, p 16
Guerbai Y, Chibani Y, Hadjadji B (2017) Handwriting gender recognition system based on the one-class support vector machines. In: proceedings of the 7th international conference on image processing theory, tools and applications, IPTA 2017, 2018-Janua (4), pp 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/IPTA.2017.8310136
Gupta S, Kumar M (2020) Forensic document examination system using boosting and bagging methodologies. Soft Comput 24:5409–5426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-019-04297-5
Guyon I, Schomaker L, Plamondon R, Liberman M, Janet S (1994) UNIPEN project of on-line data exchange and recognizer benchmarks. 12th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition. IEEE Computing Society Press, Jerusalem, pp 29–33
Hallale SB, Salunke G (2013) twelve directional feature extraction for handwritten English character recognition. In: 2013 international journal of recent technology and engineering (IJRTE), pp 39-42
Harrison D, Burkes TM, Seiger DP (2009) Handwriting examination: Meeting the challenges of science and the law. Forensic Sci Commun 11(4):1–13
Hassaïne A, Al-Maadeed S, Jaam J, Jaoua A (2013) ICDAR 2013 competition on gender prediction from handwriting. In: 2013 12th international conference on document analysis and recognition, pp 1417–1421
Ibrahim AS, Youssef A, Abbott AL (2014) Global vs. local features for gender identification using Arabic and English handwriting. In: 2014 IEEE international symposium on signal processing and information technology (ISSPIT), pp 000155–000160
Ibrahim AS, Youssef AE, Abbott AL (2015) Global vs. local features for gender identification using Arabic and English handwriting. In: 2014 IEEE international symposium on signal processing and information technology, ISSPIT. vol 2014, pp 155–160. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSPIT.2014.7300580
Illouz E, David E, Netanyahu NS (2018) Handwriting-based gender classification using end-to-end deep neural networks. In: arXiv (Vol 1). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01424-7
Kaur H, Kumar M (2018) A comprehensive survey on word recognition for non-Indic and Indic scripts. Pattern Anal Applic 21:897–929. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-018-0731-2
Kaur H, Kumar M (2021) performance evaluation of various feature selection techniques for offline handwritten gurumukhi place name recognition. In: Singh TP, Tomar R, Choudhury T, Perumal T, Mahdi HF (eds) Data driven approach towards disruptive technologies studies in autonomic, data-driven and industrial computing. Springer, Singapore
Kaur RP, Jindal MK, Kumar M (2021) Newspaper text recognition printed in Gurumukhi Script: SVM Versus MLP. In: Singh TP, Tomar Ravi, Choudhury Tanupriya, Perumal T, Mahdi HF (eds) Data driven approach towards disruptive technologies: proceedings of MIDAS 2020. Springer Singapore, Singapore, pp 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9873-9_3
Kleber F, Fiel S, Diem M, Sablatnig R (2013) CVL-DataBase: an off-line database for writer retrieval, writer identification and word spotting. In: 2013 12th international conference on document analysis and recognition, pp 560–564
Kumar M, Jindal MK, Sharma RK, Jindal SR (2018a) A novel framework for writer identification based on pre-segmented Gurmukhi characters. Sadhana - Acad Proc Eng Sci 43(12):1–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-018-0966-z
Kumar M, Jindal S, Jindal MK, Lehal GS (2018) Improved recognition results of medieval handwritten Gurmukhi manuscripts using boosting and bagging methodologies. Neural Proc Lett 50:43–56
Kumar M, Jindal MK, Sharma R, Jindal S (2019) Performance evaluation of classifiers for the recognition of offline handwritten Gurmukhi characters and numerals: a study. Artif Intell Rev 53:2075–2097
Kumar M, Gupta S, Mohan N (2020) A computational approach for printed document forensics using SURF and ORB features. Soft Comput. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-020-04733-x
Liwicki M, Schlapbach A, Bunke H (2011) Automatic gender detection using on-line and off-line information. Pattern Anal Appl 14(1):87–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-010-0178-6
Liwicki M, Bunke H (2005) IAM-OnDB - an on-line English sentence database acquired from handwritten text on a whiteboard. In: Proceedings of the 8th internetional conference on document analysis and recognition, vol 2, pp 956–961
Mahmoud SA, Ahmad I, M Alshayeb, Al-Khatib WG, Parvez MT, Fink GA, Margner V, Haikal El Abed (2012) KHATT: Arabic offline handwritten text database, 13th international conference on frontiers in handwriting recognition (ICFHR), pp 447–452
Maji P, Chakraborty S, Samanta S, Chatterjee S, Kausar N, Dey N (2015) Effect of euler number as a feature in gender recognition system from offline handwritten signature using neural networks. In: 2015 international conference on computing for sustainable global development, INDIA Com vol 2015, pp 1869–1873.
Maken P, Gupta A, Gupta M (2019) A study on various techniques involved in gender prediction system: a comprehensive review. Cyber Inform Technol 19(2):51–73. https://doi.org/10.2478/cait-2019-0015
Marti U, Bunke H (1999) A full English sentence database for off-line handwriting recognition. In: Proceedings of the fifth international conference on document analysis and recognition. ICDAR '99 (Cat. No.PR00318), pp 705–708
Marti U, Bunke H (2000) Handwritten sentence recognition. In Proc. of the 15th Int. Conf. on Pattern Recognition, Vol 3, pp 467–470
Marti U, Bunke H (2002) The IAM-database: an English sentence database for offline handwriting recognition. Int J Doc Anal Recogn 5:39–46
Mirza A, Moetesum M, Siddiqi I, Djeddi C (2016) Gender classification from offline handwriting images using textural features. In: Proceedings of international conference on frontiers in handwriting recognition, ICFHR, pp 395–398. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2016.0080
Moetesum M, Siddiqi I, Djeddi C, Hannad Y, Al-Maadeed S (2018) Data driven feature extraction for gender classification using multi-script handwritten texts. In: Proceedings of international conference on frontiers in handwriting recognition, ICFHR, 2018-Augus, pp 564–569. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR-2018.2018.00104
Morera Á, Sánchez Á, Vélez JF, Moreno AB (2018) Gender and handedness prediction from offline handwriting using convolutional neural networks. Complexity. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/3891624
Morris RN (2021) forensic handwriting identification: fundamental concepts and principles. Academic Press, Cambridge, pp 1–297
Narang SR, Jindal MK, Kumar M (2019) Devanagari ancient character recognition using DCT features with adaptive boosting and bootstrap aggregating. Soft Comput 23:13603–13614
Narang SR, Jindal M, Ahuja S, Kumar M (2020) On the recognition of Devanagari ancient handwritten characters using SIFT and Gabor features. Soft Comput 24:17279–17289
Navya BJ, Shivakumara P, Shwetha GC, Roy S, Guru DS, Pal U, Lu T (2018a) Adaptive multi-gradient kernels for handwriting based gender identification. In: Proceedings of international conference on frontiers in handwriting recognition, ICFHR, 2018a-Augus, pp 392–397. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR-2018.2018.00075
Navya BJ, Swetha GC, Shivakumara P, Roy S, Guru DS, Pal U, Lu T (2018b) Multi-gradient directional features for gender identification. In: Proceedings - international conference on pattern recognition, 2018b-Augus, pp 3657–3662. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPR.2018.8546033
Pandey P, Seeja KR (2018) Forensic writer identification with projection profile representation of graphemes. In: Somani AK, Srivastava S, Mundra A, Rawat S (eds) Proceedings of first international conference on smart system, innovations and computing. Springer Singapore, Singapore, pp 129–136. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5828-8_13
Pechwitz M, El Abed H, Märgner V (2012) Handwritten Arabic word recognition using the IFN/ENIT-database. In: Märgner V, El Abed H (eds) Guide to OCR for Arabic Scripts. Springer, London
Pietikainen M, Rosenfeld A (1982) Gray level pyramid linking as an aid in texture analysis. In: IEEE TranSo Systems, Man, Cybernetics SMC-12, pp 422–429
Purohit N, Panwar S (2021) State-of-the-Art: offline writer identification methodologies. In: 2021 international conference on computer communication and informatics (ICCCI), pp 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCI50826.2021.9402539
Rahmanian M, Shayegan MA (2021) Handwriting-based gender and handedness classification using convolutional neural networks. Multimed Tools Appl. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-10170-7
Rehman A, Naz S, Razzak MI (2019) Writer identification using machine learning approaches: a comprehensive review. Multimed Tools Appl 78(8):10889–10931. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6577-1
Riza LS, Zainafif A, Rasim S, Nazir S (2018) Fuzzy rule-based classification systems for the gender prediction from handwriting. Telkomnika Telecommun Comput Electron Control 16(6):2725–2732
Said H, Tan T, Baker K (2000) Personal identification based on handwriting. Pattern Recognit 33:149–160
Shahabi F, Rahmati M (2009) A new method for writer identification of handwritten farsi documents. In: 2009 10th international conference on document analysis and recognition, pp 426–430
Siddiqi I, Djeddi C, Raza A, Souici-meslati L (2015) Automatic analysis of handwriting for gender classification. Pattern Anal Appl 18(4):887–899. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-014-0371-0
Siddiqi I, Vincent N (2009) A set of chain code based features for writer recognition. In: 2009 10th international conference on document analysis and recognition, pp 981–985
Sokic E, Salihbegovic A, Ahic-Djokic M (2012) Analysis of off-line handwritten textsamples of different gender using shape descriptors. In: 2012 9th international symposium on telecommunications, BIHTEL 2012 Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.1109/BIHTEL.2012.6412086
Srihari SN, Cha SH, Arora H, Lee S (2002) Individuality of handwriting. J Forensic Sci 47(4):856–872
Tan J, Lai J-H, Wang P, Bi N (2015) Multiscale region projection method to discriminate between printed and handwritten text on registration forms. Int J Pattern Recognit Artif Intell 29(8):153–185
Tan J, Bi N, Suen CY, Nobile N (2016) Multi-feature selection of handwriting for gender identification using mutual information. In: Proceedings of international conference on frontiers in handwriting recognition, ICFHR, pp 578–583. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2016.0111
Topaloglu M, Ekmekci S (2017) Gender detection and identifying one’s handwriting with handwriting analysis. Expert Syst Appl 79:236–243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2017.03.001
Venugopal V, Sundaram S (2017) An online writer identification system using regression-based feature normalization and codebook descriptors. Expert Syst Appl 72:196–206
Viard-Gaudin C, Lallican P, Binter P, Kn-err S (1999) The IRESTE On/Off (IRONOFF) dual handwriting database. In: Proceedings of the fifth international conference on document analysis and recognition, ICDAR IEEE Computer Society.747Washington, DC, USA p 455
Wang T, Wu DJ, Coates A, Ng A (2012) End-to-end text recognition with convolutional neural networks. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on pattern recognition (ICPR2012), pp 3304–3308
Wu Y, Lu H, Zhang Z (2017) Text-independent online writer identification using hidden markov models. In: IEICE Trans. Inf. Syst., 100-D, pp 332–339
Xing L, Qiao Y (2016) DeepWriter: a multi-stream deep CNN for text-independent writer identification. In: 2016 15th international conference on frontiers in handwriting recognition (ICFHR), 584–589
Xue G, Liu S, Gong D, Ma Y (2020) ATP-DenseNet: a hybrid deep learning-based gender identification of handwriting. Neural Comput Appl. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-020-05237-3
Yang W, Jin L, Liu M (2016) DeepWriterID: an end-to-end online text-independent writer identification system. IEEE Intell Syst 31:45–53
Youssef AE, Ibrahim AS, Lynn Abbott A (2013) Automated gender identification for Arabic and English handwriting. In: 5th international conference on imaging for crime detection and prevention. https://doi.org/10.1049/ic.2013.0274
Zois EN, Anastassopoulos V (2000) Morphological waveform coding for writer identification. Pattern Recognit 33:385–398
Zou W, Xia Y, Cao W (2022a) Back-propagation extreme learning machine. Soft Comput 26(18):9179–9188
Zou W, Xia Y, Cao W (2022b) Broad learning system based on driving amount and optimization solution. Eng Appl Artif Intell 116:105353
Funding
This study was not funded by any organization.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Ethical approval
This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Sethi, M., Kumar, M. & Jindal, M.K. Gender prediction system through behavioral biometric handwriting: a comprehensive review. Soft Comput 27, 6307–6327 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-023-07907-5
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-023-07907-5