1. A method for face alignment, comprising steps: acquiring an image of a face and a set of initial landmark locations associated with the image; aligning globally the set of initial landmark locations to a set of landmark locations of a face with a prototype shape to obtain global alignment parameters; warping the set of initial landmark locations and the image from a coordinate frame of the image to a coordinate frame of the prototype shape according to the global alignment parameters, to obtain warped landmark locations and a warped face image; extracting features from the warped face image at the warped landmark locations; applying a regression function to the features to obtain updated landmark locations in the coordinate frame of the prototype shape; and warping the updated landmark locations in the coordinate frame of the prototype shape to the coordinate frame of the image, to obtain updated landmark locations in the image, wherein the steps are performed in a processor.