A Gabor wavelet and Memetic algorithm based face recognition technique named MA-Gabor is proposed in this paper.MA-Gabor can attain more distinctive features with less computational time by using particular Gabor wavelet filters in the feature extraction on specific areas of the face image.The Memetic algorithm is introduced in optimizing the Gabor wavelet filters' design in MA-Gabor.Experimental results show that the Memetic algorithm can achieve better design than conventional optimization approaches.The MA-Gabor algorithm

using optimized Gabor wavelet filters in feature extraction

attains higher recognition rate than state-of-the-art face recognition techniques.