1. A system for automatically localizing a set of facial landmarks on a facial image comprising: creating M sets of seed landmarks by placing seed landmarks on the facial image using a plurality of pose-specific local detectors, one pose-specific local detector for each one of M discrete yaw angles; aligning each set of seed landmarks with a plurality of pose-specific dense shapes comprising a dense set of landmarks; evaluating each dense shape for each of the M sets of seed landmarks to determine the best dense shape for each of the M sets of seed landmarks; and refining each of M best dense shapes and ranking the M best dense shapes to determine the single best dense shape containing dense landmarks best aligned with the facial image.