Abstract: Facial expression recognition is considered to be the major research area in the context of pattern recognition and image processing is considered as a vibrant research problem. The study presented in this study, demonstrates a novel algorithm developed based on the integration of Gabor filter and DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) along with AdaBoost classifier to enhance the recognition rate. Experimental results show that the proposed technique outperforms diverse existing mechanisms in terms of recognition rate while implemented on various standard facial image databases.