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Feature selection plays an important role in the machine-vision-based online detection of foreign fibers in cotton because of improvement detection accuracy and speed. Feature sets of foreign fibers in cotton belong to multi-character feature sets. That means the high-quality feature sets of foreign fibers in cotton consist of three classes of features which are respectively the color, texture and shape features. The multi-character feature sets naturally contain a space constraint which lead to the smaller feature space than the general feature set with the same number of features, however the existing algorithms do not consider the space characteristic of multi-character feature sets and treat the multi-character feature sets as the general feature sets. This paper proposed an improved ant colony optimization for feature selection, whose objective is to find the (near) optimal subsets in multi-character feature sets. In the proposed algorithm, group constraint is adopted to limit subset constructing process and probability transition for reducing the effect of invalid subsets and improve the convergence efficiency. As a result, the algorithm can effectively find the high-quality subsets in the feature space of multi-character feature sets. The proposed algorithm is tested in the datasets of foreign fibers in cotton and comparisons with other methods are also made. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can find the high-quality subsets with smaller size and high classification accuracy. This is very important to improve performance of online detection systems of foreign fibers in cotton. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]