This paper presents an efficient facial expression recognition method by measuring the histogram distance based on preprocessing. The preprocessing that uses both centroid shift and histogram equalization is applied to improve the recognition performance, The distance measurement is also applied to estimate the similarity between the facial expressions. The centroid shift based on the first moment balance technique is applied not only to obtain the robust recognition with respect to position or

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... size variations but also to reduce the distance measurement load by excluding the background in the recognition. Histogram equalization is used for robustly recognizing the poor contrast of the images due to light intensity. The proposed method has been applied for recognizing 72 facial expression images(4 persons * 18 scenes) of 320*243 pixels. Three distances such as city-block, Euclidean, and ordinal are used as a similarity measure between histograms. The experimental results show that the proposed method has superior recognition performances compared with the method without preprocessing. The ordinal distance shows superior recognition performances over city-block and Euclidean distances, respectively.