In this paper, a fully automatic, real-time system is proposed torecognize seven basic facial expressions (angry, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral,sadness and surprise), which is insensitive to illumination changes. First, face islocated and normalized based on an illumination insensitive skin model andface segmentation; then, the basic Local Binary Patterns (LBP) technique,which is invariant to monotonic grey level changes, is used for facial featureextraction; finally, a coarse-to-fine scheme is used for expression classification.Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed systemperforms well in variable illumination and some degree of head rotation