In recent years, facial expression recognition has received extensive attention in education, medicine, psychoanalysis and business. Aiming at the problems of not systematic enough and fuzzy concept of facial expression recognition method, the steps and methods of facial expression recognition were reviewed and discussed. Firstly, the commonly used facial expression databases were introduced and the development of facial expression recognition was reviewed. Then, two aspects of facial expression recognition were introduced, such as facial expression coding and facial expression recognition. The four processes of face facial expression recognition were summarized. The classical algorithms, the basic principles of these algorithms and the comparisons of their advantages and disadvantages were summarized emphatically in the two processes of feature extraction and facial expression classification. Finally, the existing problems and possible development trends in the future of the current facial expression recognition were pointed out.