Feasibility of facial expression recognition(FER) using facial expression feature extracted was ivestigated by active appearance models method(AAM).According to characteristics of face images,eye region is extracted using eigen-eye method firstly to decrease AAM optimization time and improve accuracyd of locating new objects using AAM.Rank correlation method and non-metric multidimensional scaling(nMDS) method are adopted to analyze the performance of facial expression feature extracted by using AAM method.It is proved that this kind of feature has a good ability to represent expression variability.An artificial neural network was constructed to recognize facial expression.Experiments show tha the recognition rate is 93.5 %.