A usefulgeometricalfacemodel and an efficientfacialfeaturedetection approach are proposed. Based on the fact that human facesare constructed in the same geometricalconfiguration, the proposed approach can accurately detect facial features,especiallythe eyes,even when the images have complex backgrounds.The averagecomputation timefor one imageofsize512 x 340islessthan 5 s by a SUN-Sparc 20 workstation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can efficientlydetect human facial features and satisfactorilydeal with the problems caused by bad lighting condition, skew face orientation, and evenfacial expression.© 1997Pattern Recognition Society.Published by Elsevier ScienceLtd. Geometrical facemodel Facial feature detection Face recognition Image processing