Survey on handwriting-based personality trait identification

Personality is a combination of various characteristics and qualities of an individual. It may be affected by the growth and evolution of one's values, attributes, relationships with the community, personal memories of life events, habits, and skills. Behaviours and decisions of an individual are largely directed by his/her personality. Identification of such a personality trait can be performed based on an individual's handwriting features. Handwriting may be unique for each person and a person's nature, behaviour, and certain psychological aspects can be inferred based on it. It is introduced as the field of graphology, also called graphoanalysis, to analyze personality based on handwriting. We perceived that many researchers have worked on personality and/or behaviour identification based on handwriting, however, most of them were limited to a few numbers of features. According to graphology, there is a vast range of features of handwriting strokes which carry psychological characteristics of the writer. In this survey, we present links between handwriting and personality psychology and examine different mechanisms for features extraction to predict a writer's personality. Psychologically supported handwriting features help to understand personality traits. The paper relates these features and encourages the use of computer-based graphology for personality prediction. It also discusses applications of graphology in various fields. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.