  Facial expressions are an important way through which humans interact
socially. Building a system capable of automatically recognizing facial
expressions from images and video has been an intense field of study in recent
years. Interpreting such expressions remains challenging and much research is
needed about the way they relate to human affect. This paper presents a general
overview of automatic RGB, 3D, thermal and multimodal facial expression
analysis. We define a new taxonomy for the field, encompassing all steps from
face detection to facial expression recognition, and describe and classify the
state of the art methods accordingly. We also present the important datasets
and the bench-marking of most influential methods. We conclude with a general
discussion about trends, important questions and future lines of research.
