Human facial analysis (HFA) has recently become an attractive topic for computer vision research due to the technological progress and the increase of mobile applications. HFA explores several issues as gender recognition, facial expression, age, and race recognition for automatically understanding social life. In addition, the development of several algorithms inspired by swarm intelligence, biological inspiration, and physical/mathematical rules allow giving another dimension of feature

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... ion in the field of machine learning and computer vision. This paper develops a novel wrapper feature selection method for gender recognition using the Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA). The paper's primary purpose is to automatically determine the optimal face area using AOA to recognize the gender of a human person categorized by two classes (Men and women). In this paper, the facial image is divided into several sub-regions (blocks), where each area provides a vector of characteristics using one method from handcrafted techniques as the local binary pattern (LBP), histogram oriented gradient (HOG), or Grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). The proposed method (AOA) is assessed on two publicly datasets: Georgia Tech Face dataset (GT) and the Brazilian FEI dataset. The experimental results show a good performance of AOA compared to other recent and competitive optimizers as Sine cosine algorithm (SCA), Henry Gas Solubility Optimization (HGSO), Equilibrium Optimizer (EO), Emperor Penguin Optimizer (EPO), Harris Hawks Optimize (HHO), Multi-verse Optimizer (MVO) and Manta-ray Foraging Optimizer (MRFO) in terms of accuracy and the number of the selected area.