The ability to accurately track objects of interest - particularly humans - is of great importance in the fields of security and surveillance. In such scenarios, the application of accurate, automated human tracking offers benefits over manual supervision. In this paper, recent efforts made to investigate the improvement of automated human detection and tracking techniques through the recognition of person-specific time-varying signatures in thermal video are detailed. A robust human detection algorithm is developed to aid the initialisation stage of a state-of-the-art existing tracking algorithm. In addition, coupled with the spatial tracking methods present in this algorithm, the inclusion of temporal signature recognition in the tracking process is shown to improve human tracking results.