Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-41).Despite the significant effort devoted to methods for expression recognition, suitable training and test databases designed explicitly for expression research have been largely neglected. Additionally, possible techniques for expression recognition within an Man-Machine-Interface (MMI) domain are numerous, but it remains unclear what methods are most effective for expression recognition. In response, this thesis describes the means by which an appropriate expression database has been generated and then enumerates the results of five different recognition methods as applied to that database. An analysis of the results of these experiments is given, and conclusions for future research based upon these results is put forth.by James P. Skelley.M.Eng