In this paper a system is developed for face recognition processes. Preprocessing and face localization is necessary to obtain a high classification rate in face recognition tasks. In this study after preprocessing of face images, for omitting the redundant information such as background and hair, the oval shape of face is approximated by an ellipse using shape information. Then the parameters (orientation and center coordinates) of this ellipse are optimized using Genetic Algorithm (GA). High order Pseudo Zernike Moment Invariant (PZMI) which has useful properties is utilized to produce feature vectors. Also Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) with HLA learning rule has been used as a classifier. Simulation results on ORL database indicate that the error rate of proposed system which uses genetic algorithm for optimizing the face localization step is lower than an older system which described in [2].