Emotions are primary mental states that show the person’s state of mind. Humans have evolved to understand other people’s emotions and act according to it; however, machines and models are still learning to recognize and detect emotions with complete accuracy. All machines and models that do so follow a process and use an algorithm. This paper will be explaining that process of recognizing facial emotions, two main algorithms - Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and discuss various works done in the past using the process discussed and the algorithms mentioned.