  There is an increasing scientific interest in automatically analysing and
understanding human behavior, with particular reference to the evolution of
facial expressions and the recognition of the corresponding emotions. In this
paper we propose a technique based on Functional ANOVA to extract significant
patterns of face muscles movements, in order to identify the emotions expressed
by actors in recorded videos. We determine if there are time-related
differences on expressions among emotional groups by using a functional F-test.
Such results are the first step towards the construction of a reliable
automatic emotion recognition system
