© 2017 SPIE. An infrared (IR) camera captures the temperature distribution of an object as an IR image. Because facial temperature is almost constant, an IR camera has the potential to be used in detecting facial regions in IR images. However, in detecting faces, a simple temperature thresholding does not always work reliably. The standard face detection algorithm used is AdaBoost with local features, such as Haar-like, MB-LBP, and HOG features in the visible images. However, there are few studies using these local features in IR image analysis. In this paper, we propose an AdaBoost-based training method to mix these local features for face detection in thermal images. In an experiment, we captured a dataset from 20 participants, comprising 14 males and 6 females, with 10 variations in camera distance, 21 poses, and participants with and without glasses. Using leave-one-out cross-validation, we show that the proposed mixed features have an advantage over all the regular local features.