Automatic gender detection using on-line and off-line information

In this paper, the problem of classifying handwritten data with respect to gender is addressed. A classification method based on Gaussian Mixture Models is applied to distinguish between male and female handwriting. Two sets of features using on-line and off-line information have been used for the classification. Furthermore, we combined both feature sets and investigated several combination strategies. In our experiments, the on-line features produced a higher classification rate than the off-line features. However, the best results were obtained with the combination. The final gender detection rate on the test set is 67.57%, which is significantly higher than the performance of the on-line and off-line system with about 64.25 and 55.39%, respectively. The combined system also shows an improved performance over human-based classification. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the system presented in this paper is the first completely automatic gender detection system which works on on-line data. Furthermore, the combination of on-line and off-line features for gender detection is investigated for the first time in the literature.