Facial expression recognition systems using video devices have emerged as an important component of natural human-machine interfaces which contribute to various practical applications such as security systems, behavioral science and clinical practices. In this work, we present a new method to analyze, represent and recognize human facial expressions using a sequence of facial images. Under our proposed facial expression recognition framework, the overall procedure includes: accurate face detection to remove background and noise effects from the raw image sequences and align each image using vertex mask generation. Furthermore, these features are reduced by principal component analysis. Finally, these augmented features are trained and tested using Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The experimental evaluation demonstrated the proposed approach over two public datasets such as Cohn-Kanade and AT&T datasets of facial expression videos that achieved expression recognition results as 96.75% and 96.92%. Besides, the recognition results show the superiority of the proposed approach over the state of the art methods.