Abstract Facial feature points such as eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth are prominent landmarks surrounding facial components. They depicts critical information about facial expression and head movement .Hence accurate and perfect detection of facial features is important in several applications like face recognition,face tracking,criminal identification,security and surveillance systems,Human computer interaction(HCI), model based video coding. This paper represents traditional methodologies and taxonomies along with brief introduction to recent approaches and advancements in the field proposed by various researchers that acts as a bottleneck under various situations like occlusion, pose variations, different lighting conditions.