The fact that presently I am doing my Final Year Project in the same domain with an advanced problem. I am working on detecting natural text or text in wild from natural images. Since August 2014, I have studied this area in detail. And have also tried multiple approaches both in MATLAB and OpenCV(which uses C, C++). I have a good academic experience in training classifiers, using appropriate datasets and solving similar problems. And since your task is one of the components of my own project, I can do it using best possible means.
I would like to have some clarifications on your task. Will the input image provided, will be a cropped word or the word will need to be located in an image before classifiying it as handwriting or typed.
I will be more than happy to share my results of the project and answer any of your queries.