Novel features to detect gender from handwritten documents.

• Automatic handwritten analysis system has been developed to detect the gender of the writer. • Machine learning methods have been used to extract set of gender-related features. • Large Arabic dataset was collected to conduct the experiment of the gender detection system. • Novel set of features were chosen with the consultation of a graphologist and psychologist. • Benchmark dataset was used to compare the proposed detection system with another researcher works. Gender detection from handwritten documents is a crucial research area in many disciplines such as psychology, pyelography, graphology, and forensic analysis. Furthermore, this task is challenging due to the high similarity and overlap between individuals' handwriting. The performance of the document recognition and analysis systems, depends on the extracted features from handwritten documents, which can be a challenging task as this depends on extracting the most relevant information from row text. In this paper, a set of gender-related features suggested by a graphologist, to detect the gender of the writers, have been proposed. These features include margins, space between words, pen-pressure and handwriting irregularity. Both SVM and ANN classifiers have been used to train, validate and test the proposed approach on two different data sets: our data set FSHS and ICDAR2013 dataset. The proposed method has achieved high classification rates of 94.7% and 97.1% using SVM and ANN respectively. Meanwhile, our method outperformed state-of-arts methods when applied to the ICDAR2013 dataset with classification rates of 91.4% and 92.5% using SVM and ANN respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]