Transfer Learning to Detect Age From Handwriting

Handwriting analysis is the science of determining an individual’s personality from his or her handwriting by assessing features such as slant, pen pressure, word spacing, and other factors. Handwriting analysis has a wide range of uses and applications, including dating and socialising, roommates and landlords, business and professional, employee hiring, and human resources. This study used the ResNet and GoogleNet CNN architectures as fixed feature extractors from handwriting samples. SVM was used to classify the writer’s gender and age based on the extracted features. We built an Arabic dataset named FSHS to analyse and test the proposed system. In the gender detection system, applying the automatic feature extraction method to the FSHS dataset produced accuracy rates of 84.9% and 82.2% using ResNet and GoogleNet, respectively. While the age detection system using the automatic feature extraction method achieved accuracy rates of 69.7% and 61.1% using ResNet and GoogleNet, respectively