In order to solve the problem of blurred face contour and single facial feature in some environment ima- ges ,a method of infrared and visible light face image registration based on machine vision technology is proposed. Ac- quire infrared and visible face images ,perform histogram equalization on them ,use Canny edge operator method to ex- tract face image contour ,and realize infrared and visible face image registration according to the gradient size and di- rection characteristics of the contour. The experimental results show that this method can effectively improve the regis- tration of infrared and visible face images. The registration value is 0. 961 when there is no occlusion ,and 0. 949 and 0. 944 when there is 10% and 20% occlusion ,respectively. This shows that the application effect of this method is sig- nificant.