The eye positions are very important landmarks in face recognitionIn this paper a fast hierarchical based algorithm is proposed to locate eyes from face imagesThis new algorithm involves three main stepsFirst，MER（minimum extremal region）is introduced here to locate eye roughlyThen，a three layer filter is applied to rule out false detections step by stepFinally，an accurate eye locating method is used to adjust the eye locations preciselyThis algorithm has good results in CAS PEAL，JAFFE and our own face databaseTherefore，it is considered to be an effective method