We present a robust head pose estimation system that is capable of estimating the 3D pose of a human head in video sequences captured using a single camera. The proposed system is able to accurately estimate the 3D pose parameters even without the knowledge of camera parameters. The face is modelled using a parametrized face mask in 3D. SIFT is used to match consecutive image frames. We propose a novel interpolation technique that captures the 3D movement of feature points to estimate the 2D-3D correspondences between the 3D model and the face image. The pose is established using the POSIT algorithm in a RANSAC framework that fits a 3D deformable face model onto the given face image. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme on standard test datasets. The mean absolute errors of estimated pitch, yaw and roll are found comparable and in some cases better than the results reported in literature. © 2010 ACM.