Local backlight dimming is a promising display technology, with good performance in improving the visual quality and reducing the power consumption of device displays. To set optimal backlight luminance, it is important to design high performance local dimming algorithms. In this paper, we focused on improving the quality of the displayed image, and take local backlight dimming as an optimization problem. In order to better evaluate the image quality, we used the structural similarity (SSIM) index as the image quality evaluation method, and built the model for the local dimming problem. To solve this optimization problem, we designed the local dimming algorithm based on the Fireworks Algorithm (FWA), which is a new evolutionary computation (EC) algorithm. To further improve the solution quality, we introduced a guiding strategy into the FWA and proposed an improved algorithm named the Guided Fireworks Algorithm (GFWA). Experimental results showed that the GFWA had a higher performance in local backlight dimming compared with the Look-Up Table (LUT) algorithm, the Improved Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm (ISFLA), and the FWA.