Abstract. As a challenging interdisciplinary in biometrics and emotional computing, Facial expression recognition (FER) has become a research hotspot in the field of pattern recognition, computer vision and artificial intelligence both at home and abroad. The extraction and selection of facial expression features is one of the most important steps in the process of FER, The validity of the features extracted directly affect the performance of FER. This paper focus on the analysis of the current research states of the latest facial expression extraction algorithm based the twodimensional and the three-dimensional, try to analyze and compare the various methods in theory, and comprehensively study facial expression recognition based the convolution neural network. Finally, the research challenges are generally concluded, and the possible trends are outlined.