  Handwriting-based gender classification is a well-researched problem that has
been approached mainly by traditional machine learning techniques. In this
paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach for this task.
Specifically, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN), which performs
automatic feature extraction from a given handwritten image, followed by
classification of the writer's gender. Also, we introduce a new dataset of
labeled handwritten samples, in Hebrew and English, of 405 participants.
Comparing the gender classification accuracy on this dataset against human
examiners, our results show that the proposed deep learning-based approach is
substantially more accurate than that of humans.
