Over the last decade, facial expression analysis has become an active research area which finds potential applications in fields such as more engaging human-computer interaction, multimedia information analysis and retrieval, biometrics for security and surveillance, entertainment and e-health.In this paper, we propose a novel facial expression recognition algorithrns based on Fractional cosine transform (FRCT) for feature extraction.We do experiments on JAFFE database and RML database and verify the effectiveness of the method.