Appearance-based subspace models such as eigenfaces have been widely recognized as one of the most successful approaches to face recognition and tracking. The success of eigenfaces mainly has its origins in the benefits offered by principal component analysis (PCA), the representational power of the underlying generative process for high-dimensional noisy facial image data. The sparse extension of PCA (SPCA) has recently received significant attention in the research community. SPCA functions by imposing sparseness constraints on the eigenvectors, a technique that has been shown to yield more robust solutions in many applications. However, when SPCA is applied to facial images, the time and space complexity of PCA learning becomes a critical issue (e.g., real-time tracking). In this paper, we propose a very fast and scalable greedy forward selection algorithm for SPCA. Unlike a recent semidefinite program-relaxation method that suffers from complex optimization, our approach can process several thousands of data dimensions in reasonable time with little accuracy loss. The effectiveness of our proposed method was demonstrated on real-world face recognition and tracking datasets.