In order to effectively improve the performance of facial expression recognition under the noisy background, a method of robust facial expression recognition based on compressed sensing is proposed. Firstly, the sparse representation of corrupted expression images of the identified test sample is sought, then the compressed sensing theory is used to solve its sparsest solution. Finally, according to the sparsest solution, facial expression classification is performed. Experimental results on benchmarking Cohn-Kanade database show that facial expression performance obtained by this method is better than the nearest neighbor (NN), support vector machine (SVM) and the nearest subspace (NS). Therefore, the proposed method shows both good recognition performance and high robustness on facial expression recognition tasks.