The presented study concerns development of a facial detection algorithm operating robustly in the thermal infrared spectrum. The paper presents a brief review of existing face detection algorithms, describes the experiment methodology and selected algorithms. For the comparative study of facial detection three methods presenting three different approaches were chosen, namely the Viola–Jones, YOLOv2 and Faster-RCNN. All these algorithms were investigated along with various configurations and parameters and evaluated using three publicly available thermal face datasets. The comparison of the original results of various experiments for the selected algorithms is presented.