Because the Active Appearance Model (AAM) is sensitive to the initial parameters, it is difficult to track an object that shows a large motion. This paper proposes an active contour combined Active Appearance Model that can track an object whose motion is large. The proposed AAM fitting algorithm consists of two alternating procedures: active contour fitting to find the contour sample that best fits the face image and then the active appearance model fitting that begins from the estimated motion parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed active contour combined AAM provides better accuracy and convergence characteristics in terms of RMS error and convergence rate than the existing AAM. The combination of the existing robust AAM and the proposed active contour based AAM (AC-R-AAM) had the best accuracy and convergence performances.