Abstract. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for general 2D image matching, which is known to be an NP-complete optimization problem. With our algorithm, the complexity is handled by sequentially optimizing the image columns from left to right in a two-level dynamic programming procedure. On a local level, a set of hypotheses is computed for each column, while on a global level the best sequence of these hypotheses is selected. The optimization on the local level is guided by a lookahead that gives an estimate about the not yet optimized part of the image. We evaluate the algorithm on the task of pose-invariant face recognition in an automatic setup and show that the suggested method is competitive and achieves very good recognition accuracies on the popular face recognition databases CMU-PIE and CMU-MultiPIE.