In the work of facial expression recognition in infrared thermal imaging, because infrared thermal imaging is easy to be disturbed by noise and the processing process is complicated, the time cost of facial expression recognition is relatively high. In view of this situation, an artificial intelligence-based facial expression recognition based on infrared thermal imaging is proposed. After collecting the infrared thermal imaging information, grayscale processing and denoising are carried out, and the two eyes are used as the benchmark to complete the normalization of the image. On this basis, artificial intelligence technology is adopted to segment the image according to the proportion of three chambers and five eyes, and facial expression features are extracted by using space-time descriptors, and facial expression features are described by histograms, and facial expression labels are made. Used to recognize facial expressions. The experimental results show that the proposed facial expression recognition method based on artificial intelligence takes less time in feature processing, the algorithm has high efficiency, and can maintain a high level of recognition rate under complex environment. It has good performance in practical application, and is suitable for application in practical projects.