Hybrid BFO and PSO Swarm Intelligence Approach for Biometric Feature Optimization

Nature-inspired novel swarm intelligence algorithms have gained more proliferation due to a variety of applications and uses in optimization of complex problems and selection of discriminatory sets of features to classify huge datasets during the past few decades. Feature selection is an efficient and useful pre-processing technique for solving classification problems in computer vision, data mining and pattern recognition. The major challenges of solving the feature selection problems lay in swarm intelligence algorithms which are capable of handling the vast number of feature sets from involved databases. In biometric based recognition systems, face recognition is a non-intrusive approach to identify individuals based on their discriminatory sets of facial feature vectors. In this paper, the authors tend to propose a unique novel hybrid based on Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO) and Particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach for the selection of best facial feature vectors that enhance the identification accuracy of the individual recognition because concerned facial info will contain useless and redundant face expression. The proposed hybrid approach mitigates irrelevant facial features in the feature space and selects the relevant set of features from the facial feature space. The proposed feature selection approach presents promising experimental results with respect to the number of facial feature subsets. The identification accuracies are superior to other approaches from the literature.