Recently developed appearance descriptors offer the opportunity for efficient and robust facial expression recognition. In this paper we investigate the merits of the family of local binary pattern descriptors for FACS Action-Unit (AU) detection. We compare Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Local Phase Quantisation (LPQ) for static AU analysis. To encode facial expression dynamics, we extend the purely spatial representation LPQ to a dynamic texture descriptor which we call Local Phase Quantisation from Three Orthogonal Planes (LPQ-TOP), and compare this with the Local Binary Patterns from Three Orthogonal Planes (LBP-TOP). The efficiency of these descriptors is evaluated by a fully automatic AU detection system and tested on posed and spontaneous expression data collected from the MMI and SEMAINE databases. Results show that the systems based on LPQ achieve higher accuracy rate than those using LBP, and that the systems that utilise dynamic appearance descriptors outperform those that use static appearance descriptors. Overall, our proposed LPQ-TOP method outperformed all other tested methods.