1. A method for tracking local deformable motion of an object, the object being viewed in an image sequence, the method comprises the steps of: sampling image regions to identify object image regions and background image regions; estimating motion of at least one of the identified background image regions to identify those background image regions affected by global motion; combining motion from multiple background image regions to measure the global motion in that image frame; compensating for the measured global motion in the object image regions to measure local motion of the object; and tracking the local motion of the object.