Age, gender and handedness prediction from handwriting using gradient features

This work introduces two gradient features for writer´s gender, handedness, and age range prediction. The first feature is the Histogram of Oriented Gradients, which highlights the distribution of gradient orientations within images. The second feature is the so-called gradient local binary patterns, which is an improved gradient feature that incorporates the local binary pattern neighborhood in the gradient calculation. The prediction task is achieved by using SVM classifier. Experiments are performed on two corpuses of English and Arabic handwritten text. The results obtained in terms of classification accuracy highlight the effectiveness of the proposed features, which overcome the state of the art.