Facial expression, which changes face geometry, usually has an adverse effect on the performance of a face recognition system. To improve the face recognition rate, we propose a normalization method of facial expression to diminish the difference of facial expression between probe and gallery faces. Two approaches are used to facial expression modeling and normalization from single still images using a generic facial muscle model without the need of large image databases. The first approach estimates the geometry parameters of linear muscle models to obtain a biologically inspired model of the facial expression which may be changed intuitively afterwards. The second approach uses RBF(Radial Basis Function) based interpolation and warping to normalize the facial muscle model as unexpressed face according to the given expression. As a preprocessing stage for face recognition, these approach could achieve significantly higher recognition rates than in the un-normalized case based on the eigenface approach, local binary patterns and a grey-scale correlation measure.