Gender Classification From Pashto Handwritten Text Images

Computer vision (CV) is a subfield of computer science that enables machines to perceive, interpret, and understand visual data. It combines image processing, analysis, and machine learning to extract meaningful insights from images and videos. One key application of CV is the classification of gender from handwritten text images-a complex task, especially in languages such as Pashto due to the intricacy of the script and the limited resources. This research presents a novel approach to gender classification using Pashto Handwritten Text Images (PHTI). The study evaluates and compares the performance of traditional machine learning and modern deep learning models: Support Vector Machine (SVM) and You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLO8), a CNN-based object detection framework. The PHTI dataset, introduced in this study, consists of $36,086$ text line images written by 200 male and 200 female native Pashto writers. The goal is to assess how effectively SVM and YOLO8 can classify gender based on visual handwriting patterns in the Pashto language. The experimental results reveal that YOLO8 outperforms SVM in classification accuracy. Although SVM, a widely used machine learning model, achieved an accuracy of 61.29%, YOLO8 reached a significantly higher accuracy of 77% in the same data set. This performance gap highlights the advantages of using advanced deep learning models for complex pattern recognition tasks in CV. This research provides a pioneering contribution by focusing on Pashto, a low-resource language, in the context of gender classification using handwritten text images. It opens new pathways for applying CV in regional languages and supports the development of intelligent systems capable of handling various scripts.