With the development of deep learning, the structure of convolution neural network is becoming more and more complex and the performance of object recognition is getting better. However, the classification mechanism of convolution neural networks is still an unsolved core problem. The main problem is that convolution neural networks have too many parameters, which makes it difficult to analyze them. In this paper, we design and train a convolution neural network based on the expression recognition, and explore the classification mechanism of the network. By using the Deconvolution visualization method, the extremum point of the convolution neural network is projected back to the pixel space of the original image, and we qualitatively verify that the trained expression recognition convolution neural network forms a detector for the specific facial action unit. At the same time, we design the distance function to measure the distance between the presence of facial feature unit and the maximal value of the response on the feature map of convolution neural network. The greater the distance, the more sensitive the feature map is to the facial feature unit. By comparing the maximum distance of all facial feature elements in the feature graph, the mapping relationship between facial feature element and convolution neural network feature map is determined. Therefore, we have verified that the convolution neural network has formed a detector for the facial Action unit in the training process to realize the expression recognition.