We describe an approach for extracting facial features from images and for determining the spatial organization between these features using the concept of a deformable template. This is a parameterized geometric model of the object to be recognized together with a measure of how well it fits the image data. Variations in the parameters correspond to allowable deformations of the object and can be specified by a probabilistic model. After the extraction stage the parameters of the deformable template can be used for object description and recognition.