Abstract: We propose an automatic method for person-independent fitting of a deformable 3D face mask model under varying illumination conditions. Principle Component Analysis is utilised to build a face model which is then used within a particle filter based approach to fit the mask to the image. By subdividing a coarse mask and using a novel texture mapping technique, we further apply the 3D face model to fit into lower resolution images. The illumination invariance is achieved by representing each face as a combination of harmonic images within the weighting function of the particle filter. We demonstrate the performance of our approach on the IMM Face Database and the Extended Yale Face Database B and show that it outperforms the Active Shape Models approach [6].