The invention provides an intelligent wheelchair man-machine interaction system and method based on facial expression recognition and relates to the field of the biology, the psychology, the computer vision, mode recognition, artificial intelligence and the like. According to the method, a geometric model matching algorithm is used for automatically locating centralized effective eyebrow, eye and mouth areas of facial features, then ASM feature points of the eyebrow, eye and mouth areas are located, and convolution operation is carried out on located feature point pixels and Gabor wavelet kernel functions to extract the facial expression features; an Adaboost algorithm is used for iterating and training the facial features to obtain an expression classifying model; the expression classifying model is adopted for recognizing input expression sequences in a classifying mode, the input expression sequences are compared with a control instruction defined in advance, and therefore interaction control over an intelligent wheelchair from facial expression recognition is achieved. When the facial expression features are extracted, real-time recognition of facial expressions is greatly improved, and real-time reaction with the intelligent wheelchair is greatly improved.