Abstract Alignment of 3D objects from 2D images is one of the most important and well studied problems in computer vision. A typical object alignment system consists of a landmark appearance model which is used to obtain an initial shape and a shape model which refifines this initial shape by correcting the initialization errors. Since errors in landmark initialization from the appearance model propagate through the shape model, it is critical to have a robust landmark appearance model. While there has been much progress in designing sophisticated and robust shape models, there has been relatively less progress in designing robust landmark detection models. In this paper we present an effificient and robust landmark detection model which is designed specififically to minimize localization errors thereby leading to state-of-the-art object alignment performance. We demonstrate the effificacy and speed of the proposed approach on the challenging task of multi-view car alignment.