Purpose The purpose of this paper is to improve the accuracy of the facial expression recognition by using genetic algorithm (GA) with an appropriate fitness evaluation function and Pareto optimization model with two new objective functions. Design/methodology/approach To achieve facial expression recognition with high accuracy, the Haar-like features representation approach and the bilateral filter are first used to preprocess the facial image. Second, the uniform local Gabor binary patterns are used to extract the facial feature so as to reduce the feature dimension. Third, an improved GA and Pareto optimization approach are used to select the optimal significant features. Fourth, the random forest classifier is chosen to achieve the feature classification. Subsequently, some comparative experiments are implemented. Finally, the conclusion is drawn and some future research topics are pointed out. Findings The experiment results show that the proposed facial expression recognition algorithm outperforms ones in the existing literature in terms of both the actuary and computational time. Originality/value The GA and Pareto optimization algorithm are combined to select the optimal significant feature. To improve the accuracy of the facial expression recognition, the GA is improved by adjusting an appropriate fitness evaluation function, and a new Pareto optimization model is proposed that contains two objective functions indicating the achievements in minimizing within-class variations and in maximizing between-class variations.