Summary: The role of topographical constraints for recognition performance is investigated systematically for the case of face recognition. Images are represented by rectangular graphs labeled with jets, based on a Gabor wavelet transform. Topographical constraints are varied between rigid and no constraints, A comparison with two elastic graph matching algorithms is made. The simple methods presented in this paper and elastic graph matching perform comparably on easy galleries, i.e. different facial expression or \(11^{\circ}\) rotation in depth. On a \(22^\circ\) gallery, elastic graph matching performs significantly better.