Feature selection (FS) is a most important step which can affect the performance of pattern recognition system. This paper presents a novel feature selection method that is based on ant colony optimization (ACO). ACO algorithm is inspired of ant's social behavior in their search for the shortest paths to food sources. In the proposed algorithm, classifier performance and the length of selected feature vector are adopted as heuristic information for ACO. So, we can select the optimal feature subset without the priori knowledge of features. Simulation results on face recognition system and ORL database show the superiority of the proposed algorithm
