Feature selection for face recognition based on multi-objective evolutionary wrappers

• We describe a methodology for the selection of relevant features for face recognition.
• Multiobjective wrappers are designed by means of genetic algorithms.
• We aim to minimize the number of features while maximizing discriminability.
• Results show that the proposed approach provides improved classification performance.

Feature selection is a key issue in pattern recognition, specially when prior knowledge of the most discriminant features is not available. Moreover, in order to perform the classification task with reduced complexity and acceptable performance, usually features that are irrelevant, redundant, or noisy are excluded from the problem representation. This work presents a multi-objective wrapper, based on genetic algorithms, to select the most relevant set of features for face recognition tasks. The proposed strategy explores the space of multiple feasible selections in order to minimize the cardinality of the feature subset, and at the same time to maximize its discriminative capacity. Experimental results show that, in comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed approach allows to improve the classification performance, while reducing the representation dimensionality.