Active Appearance Models work by creating a deformable model of appearance built by combining a point distribution model with a texture model using principal component analysis (PCA). Basically what that means you take a bunch of faces, located landmark points like the corners of eyes, apex of the chin, etc., create an average face and use PCA to statistically model the variations. Next you morph the faces together from their original landmark points to average face, and do a PCA on the pixel values. This creates a pixel-wise model of 'texture' which also models variations. With these two parts you have a thing that (with a good sampling of face) models most faces and emotions with about say 80 to 120 numbers and statistical ranges for those numbers.

So how do you use this to track faces? Well you use gradient decent to optimize the appearance of the face to image by adjusting those 80-120 values, x, y, scale, rotation until the pixel difference is close to zero. The trick is the gradients are approximated by precomputed derivative images, but this only works if the model is initialized on top of the original face. You can see in the video, he used Viola-Jones (the green squares) to locate the face and then dropped the AAM on top of it. He's only showing the landmark points and not the texture model.

I did my dissertation on this almost a decade ago for tracking MRs of hearts, even back then it was pretty fast. What's interesting is not only can the model identify, but you can also reconstruct synthetic images of faces, and the model parameters could be used for identifying a person, identifying an emotion, creating a synthetic face swapping another person's identity but keeping the same parameters for expression, etc. My own implementation reliably detected anomalies in beating hearts.

I really wanted to build a business around it back then, but it was in conflict with my advisor and university at the time.

My mistake...I just saw the video where Hinton was suggesting to Google, tongue-in-cheek, to use his RBM bottleneck trick as a method of databasing and then to see this guy's paper mentioning the very same thing a few weeks later.

It was a skim to see what the hell the article was really about, didn't know these two were connected. I jumped the gun 'cause I got burned by a plagiarizer in the past, sorry.

I don't know how far away from retirement you are, but $300 now probably has a future worth of much more than $1000, depending on your circumstances. Figuring that 9% is a doable long term rate of return (many people figure 10%, but I'm a bit more conservative), $300 = $6,919.02 in 35 years, and $10,832.97 in 40 years. That is fine and dandy, but what you should also consider is that unless you've already maxed out your 401(k) or other tax deffered retirement account, $300 in your pocket is actually probably worth more like $350 or $400 pretax.

So revisiting the 9% calculations, we're talking about $400 pretax growing to $9,225.35 in 35 years, and $14,443.96 in 40 years. That's not chump change! And all it took was to buck up and not buy a complete luxury. Do not delude yourself and think that you'll be able to live on Social Security. Today's retirees can't even do that! Save, Save, Save, now that you're young and have time on your side. Plan it out, and force yourself to save according to the plan. Then you can buy any luxury you want with the money you have left over, guilt free, with the reassuring knowledge that you'll be free from worry not only in retirement, but in middle age, when you have even more responsibilities and with a fast approaching retirement.

It's not rocket science, folks. Spend less than you make. Invest a good chunk each month. You'll be wealthy!