13. The method of claim 8 , comprising comparing the image data to a database of known image data based on the aligned template.
8. A method, comprising: acquiring image data for an image of a person; and aligning a template to the image data by maximizing a strong classifier score, wherein the strong classifier score is based on a plurality of weak classifiers defined by positive and negative training images; wherein the positive training images are obtained by warping image data according to ground truth shape parameters, and the negative training images are obtained by warping the image data according to perturbed shape parameters.