Provided are a method and an apparatus for accurately detecting positions of eyes in an input face image. The method includes extracting a symmetric face region from a face image based on magnitude and phase of gradient in each pixel of the face image; detecting available eye positions based on brightness information of the extracted face region; verifying regions around each of the detected eye positions with a classifier which determines whether an input image is an eye image using information obtained by supervised learning on sample images. According to the present invention, faulty eye detection is prevented by removing obscuring elements such as illumination, glasses and hair from an input face image. Also, eye coordinates can be extracted more accurately using an eye classifier.