Summary: Due to the limitations of current computer graphics technology mimicing realistic facial textures, such as wrinkles, is very difficult. Facial texture updating and compression are crucial to achieving realistic facial animation for low bit rate modelbased coding. In this paper, we present a partial texture updating method for realistic facial expression synthesis with facial wrinkles. First, fiducial points on a face are estimated using a color-based deformable template matching method. Second, an extended dynamic mesh matching algorithm is developed for face tracking. Next, Textures Of Interest (TOI) in the potential expressive wrinkles and mouth-eye texture areas are captured by the detected fiducial points. Among the TOI, the so-called active textures or expressive textures are extracted by exploring temporal correlation information. Finally, the entire facial texture is synthesized using the active texture. Compared to the entire texture updating scheme, partially updating and compressing facial textures significantly reduce the computational complexity and bit rates while still producing an acceptable visual quality. Experiments on the video sequences demonstrate the advantage of the proposed algorithm.