**Abstract**

In this chapter, we investigated computer vision technique for facial expression recognition, which increase both - the recognition rate and computational efficiency. Local and global appearance-based features are combined in order to incorporate precise local texture and global shapes. We proposed Multi-Level Haar (MLH) feature based system, which is simple and fast in computation. The driving factors behind using the Haar were its two interesting properties - signal compression and energy preservation. To depict the importance of facial geometry, we first segmented the facial components like eyebrows, eye, and mouth, and then applied feature extraction on these facial components only. Experiments are conducted on three well known publicly available expression datasets CK, JAFFE, TFEID and inhouse WESFED dataset. The performance is measured against various template matching and machine learning classifiers. We achieved highest recognition rate for proposed operator with Discriminant Analysis Classifier. We studied the performance of proposed approach in several scenarios like expression recognition from low resolution, recognition from small training sample space, recognition in the presence of noise and so forth.

**Keywords:** facial expression recognition, multi-level Haar, local mean binary pattern, local Haar mean binary pattern, classification
