Surveillance systems play a critical role in security and surveillance. A surveillance system with cameras that work in the visible spectrum is sufficient for most cases. However, problems may arise during the night, or in areas with less than ideal illumination conditions. Cameras with thermal infrared technology can be a better option in these situations since they do not rely on illumination to observe the environment. Furthermore, in our daily lives, it is common for humans to wear headgears such as glasses, masks, and hats. In surveillance, such headgears can be a hindrance to the identification of a person, and hence pose a certain degree of risk. This is not ideal in areas where the identity of a person is important, for example, in a bank. Therefore, in this paper we propose a headgear recognition method using an innovative decomposition approach on thermal infrared images. The decomposition method is based on Robust Principal Component Analysis, a modification of the popular Principal Component Analysis. The proposed method performs decomposition on a human image and isolates headgears in the image for recognition purposes. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the capability of the proposed method. The results show a positive outcome when compared with other methods.