I’ve been working on developing a method for automatic head-pose tracking, and along the way have come to model facial appearances. I start by initializing a facial bounding box using the Viola-Jones detector, a well known and robust detector used for training objects. This allows me to centralize the face. Once I know where the 2D plane of the face is in an image, I can register an Active Shape Model like so:

After multiple views of the possible appearance variations of my face, including slight rotations, I construct an appearance model.

The idea I am working with is using the first components of variations of this appearance model for determining pose. Here I show the first two basis vectors and the images they reconstruct:

As you may notice, these two basis vectors very neatly encode rotation. By looking at the eigenvalues of the model, you can also interpret pose.