  Facial thermography is one of the most popular research areas in infrared
thermal imaging, with diverse applications in medical, surveillance, and
environmental monitoring. However, in contrast to facial imagery in the visual
spectrum, the lack of public datasets on facial thermal images is an obstacle
to research improvement in this area. Thermal face imagery is still a
relatively new research area to be evaluated and studied in different
domains.The current thermal face datasets are limited in regards to the
subjects' distance from the camera, the ambient temperature variation, and
facial landmarks' localization. We address these gaps by presenting a new
facial thermography dataset. This article makes two main contributions to the
body of knowledge. First, it presents a comprehensive review and comparison of
current public datasets in facial thermography. Second, it introduces and
studies a novel public dataset on facial thermography, which we call it
Charlotte-ThermalFace. Charlotte-ThermalFace contains more than10000 infrared
thermal images in varying thermal conditions, several distances from the
camera, and different head positions. The data is fully annotated with the
facial landmarks, ambient temperature, relative humidity, the air speed of the
room, distance to the camera, and subject thermal sensation at the time of
capturing each image. Our dataset is the first publicly available thermal
dataset annotated with the thermal sensation of each subject in different
thermal conditions and one of the few datasets in raw 16-bit format. Finally,
we present a preliminary analysis of the dataset to show the applicability and
importance of the thermal conditions in facial thermography. The full dataset,
including annotations, are freely available for research purpose at
https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/UNCC-ThermalFace
