Building Systems for Adaptive Tracking of Facial Features across Individuals and Groups

Computer implemented methods for generating a non-transient record of feature locations and/or facial expression parameters characterizing a person's face. A video sequence of a specified individual person is received and a feature locator update model is applied to the video sequence. The feature locator update model is derived by defining a set of training images, generating a set of facial feature displacements for each training image with associated image sample vectors, and training a regularized linear regression which maps from image sample vectors to displacement vectors, wherein the regularization includes a spatial smoothness term within the shape-free sample space. A feature location and/or a facial expression parameter is then extracted, based on the feature update model, characterizing the location, and/or the expression, of a selected set of features of the face of the specified individual person that correspond to an adaptive set of feature locations.