Emotion recognition via facial expressions (ERFE) has attracted a great deal of interest with recent advances in artificial intelligence and patte recognition. Most studies are based on 2D images, and their performance is usually computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a real-time emotion recognition approach based on both 2D and 3D facial expression features captured by Kinect sensors. To capture the deformation of the 3D mesh during facial expression, we combine the features of animation units (AUs) and feature point positions (FPPs) tracked by Kinect. A fusion algorithm based on improved emotional profiles (IEPs) and maximum confidence is proposed to recognize emotions with these real-time facial expression features. Experiments on both an emotion dataset and a real-time video show the superior performance of our method.