Facial feature points can be identified through their miscellaneous properties. Their
extraction has also a high relevance in domains like gesture detection, emotion
recognition and the transfer of real facial expressions onto an avatar. Such feature
points are often used to identify a face in an image but, vice versa, to detect the face
region at first with a different, global approach could help making a following feature
extraction more robust and effective. The feature extraction approach presented here makes use of several image processing techniques which are described in the following sections.