Recognition of emotions by utilizing facial expressions is the progression of determining the various human facial emotions to infer the mental condition of the person. This recognition structure has been employed in several fields but more commonly applied in medical arena to determine psychological health problems. In this research work, a new hybrid model is projected using deep learning to recognize and classify facial expressions into seven emotions. Primarily, the facial image data is obtained from the datasets and subjected to pre-processing using adaptive median filter (AMF). Then, the features are extracted and facial emotions are classified through the improved VGG16+Aquila_BiLSTM (iVABL) deep optimal network. The proposed iVABL model provides accuracy of 95.63%, 96.61% and 95.58% on KDEF, JAFFE and Facial Expression Research Group 2D Database (FERG-DB) which is higher when compared to DCNN, DBN, Inception-V3, R-152 and Convolutional Bi-LSTM models. The iVABL model also takes less time to recognize the emotion from the facial image compared to the existing models.