Robust soft-biometrics prediction from off-line handwriting analysis

Currently, writer's soft-biometrics prediction is gaining an important role in various domains related to forensics and anonymous writing identification. The purpose of this work is to develop a robust prediction of the writer's gender, age range and handedness. First, three prediction systems using SVM classifier and different features, that are pixel density, pixel distribution and gradient local binary patterns, are proposed. Since each system performs differently to the others, a combination method that aggregates a robust prediction from individual systems, is proposed. This combination uses Fuzzy MIN and MAX rules to combine membership degrees derived from predictor outputs according to their performances, which are modeled by Fuzzy measures. Experiments are conducted on two Arabic and English public handwriting datasets. The comparison of individual predictors with the state of the art highlights the relevance of proposed features. Besides, the proposed Fuzzy MIN-MAX combination comfortably outperforms individual systems and classical combination rules. Relatively to Sugeno's Fuzzy Integral, it has similar computational complexity while performing better in most cases. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.