Feature Selection is an optimization problem in any Face Recognition technology. This paper proposes a novel method of Binary Particle Swarm Optimization called Accelerated Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (ABPSO) by intelligent acceleration of particles. Together with Image Pre-processing techniques such as Resolution Conversion, Histogram Equalization and Edge Detection, ABPSO is used for feature selection to obtain significantly reduced feature subset and improved recognition rate. The performance of ABPSO is established by computing the recognition rate and the number of selected features on ORL database and Cropped Yale B database.