There is provided a discriminative framework for image alignment. Image alignment is generally the process of moving and deforming a template to minimize the distance between the template and an image. There are essentially three elements to image alignment, namely template representation, distance metric, and optimization method. For template representation, given a face dataset with ground truth landmarks, a boosting-based classifier is trained that is able to learn the decision boundary between two classes—the warped images from ground truth landmarks (e.g., positive class) and those from perturbed landmarks (e.g., negative class). A set of trained weak classifiers based on Haar-like rectangular features determines a boosted appearance model. A distance metric is a score from the strong classifier, and image alignment is the process of optimizing (e.g., maximizing) the classification score. On the generic face alignment problem, the proposed framework greatly improves the robustness, accuracy, and efficiency of alignment.