Age detection from handwriting using different feature classification models

Digitized handwritten documents have been used for various purposes, including age detection, a crucial area of research in fields like forensic investigation and medical diagnosis. Automated age recognition is deemed to be a difficult task, due to the great degree of similarity and overlap across people’s handwriting. Consequently, the efficiency of the classification system is determined by extracting pertinent features from handwritten documents. This research proposes a set of age-related features suggested by a graphologist to classify handwritten documents into two age groups: youth adult and mature adult. The extracted features are: slant irregularity (SI), pen pressure irregularity (PPI), text lines irregularity (TLI) and the percentage of black and white pixels (PWB). Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Neural Network (NN) classifiers have been used to train, validate and test the proposed approach using two different datasets: the FSHS and the Khatt datasets. When applied to the FSHS dtaset using SVM and NN approaches, the proposed method resulted in a classification accuracy of 71% and 63.5%, respectively. Meanwhile, when applied to the Khatt dataset, our method outperformed state-of-the-art methods with a classification accuracy of 65.2% and 67% utilising SVM and NN classifiers, respectively. These are the best rates available right now in this field.