Abstract: As a challenging interdiscipline ofbiologic feature recognition and affection calculation, the technique ofautomatic recognition of facial expression (facial expression automatic recognition system, FEARS) develops quickly driven by demands of various applications. Nevertheless, fully automatic facial expression recognition systemswith acceptable robustnesshave notyetcome forth due to the great difficulties. The three key procedures for automatic recognition of facial expression are facial image detection, location and extraction of facial features and emotion classification, and greatadvances have been achieved on the three fields. The remaining problems include improving the robustness of facial recognition algorithms, precise and pertinence of identification of facial features, separation of rigid facial actions and recognition of three-dimensional facial expressions. To build the data bases of facial expressions and application research are also importan.t Indexes, such as applicability, comparability and appropriative and real-time performances, are proposed for evaluating automatic recognition systems of facial expressions.