Motivated by the success of free-parts based representations in face recognition, we have attempted to address some of the problems associated with applying such a philosophy to the task of speaker-independent visual speech recognition. A major problem with canonical area-based approaches in automatic visual speech recognition is the dependence these approaches have on locating and tracking the speaker?s region of interest (ROI) correctly. By employing a free-parts representation,we assume that the position/structure of patches within the mouth image can be relaxed so they can "freely" move to varying extents, hence reducing the influence of the front-end effect. In this paper, we show that by using a free-parts representation we gain some robustness against the problem of ROI localisation and tracking compared to current area-based feature extraction techniques such as the discrete cosine transform (DCT). Also in this paper, we expose the importance of representation for the task of visual speech recognition highlighted by the poor results current representations yield.