A Convolution Deep Architecture for Gender Classification of Urdu Handwritten Characters

Writing is a commonplace activity that individuals partake in regularly. However, the implications behind it are often overlooked. When we write, various psychological factors come into play as the pen creates letters on the paper. Handwriting analysis has long been a subject of study, attracting researchers from diverse disciplines such as graphology, psychology, paleography, neuroscience, criminology, and computer science. Among the promising applications of handwriting analysis is gender classification, where a system can predict the gender of a writer based on their handwriting style. Since each individual's handwriting is unique, and variations exist between the handwriting of different genders, an automatic gender classification system can exploit these differences to make predictions. This paper presents a deep-learning-based gender classification system specifically designed for Urdu handwriting. The proposed approach utilizes a CNN network trained and tested on a self-created dataset contributed by 200 distinct male and 200 female Urdu writers. Through this method, the gender classification system achieved an impressive overall accuracy of 99.63%. The results obtained demonstrate that our technique for Urdu handwriting-based writer identification surpasses existing approaches. In the future, we intend to explore transfer learning techniques to further advance this field.