The accurate detection of emotions holds significant importance in the field of psychology, necessitating the careful selection of an appropriate model for facial expression classification. In this study, emotion detection is the classification task to compare the performance of MobileNet, ResNet, and DenseNet. For the detailed model, MobileNet, ResNet50, and DenseNet169 are selected for comparative analysis. The dataset FER-2013 is from Kaggle, which contains a training set and test set consisting of 29, 709 samples and 3589 samples, respectively, with seven facial expression categories. In terms of preprocessing, normalization, and data augmentation are considered. The whole dataset is normalized by dividing 255 and augmented with a Keras image generator. In the model-building step, the structure of the test models is controlled in the same structure. The pre-trained model from the Keras application connects with one global average pooling layer and adds one dense layer at the last as the output layer with the SoftMax activation function. Moreover, this study kept all hyper all parameters the same during the training period. After the model training, the confusion matrix is used to show the class relativity and the loss and accuracy of each model are plotted for analysis. Experimental results demonstrated that the MobileNet achieves 56.08% accuracy on test set which is more competitive than the DenseNet169 and ResNet50 and provides a relatively stable loss.