Although the use of super-resolution techniques has demonstrated the ability to improve face recognition accuracy when compared to traditional upsampling techniques, they are difficult to implement for real-time use due to their complexity and high computational demand. As a large portion of processing time is dedicated to registering the lowresolution images, many have adopted global motion models in order to improve efficiency. The drawback of such global models is that they can not accommodate for complex local motions, such as multiple objects moving independently across and static or dynamic background as frequently occurs in a surveillance environment. Local methods like optical flow can compensate for these situations, although it is achieved at the expense of computation time. In this paper, experiments have been carried out to investigate how motion models of different super-resolution reconstruction algorithms affect reconstruction error and face recognition rates in a surveillance environment. Results show that lower reconstruction error doesn?t necessarily imply better recognition rates and the use of local motion models yields better recognition rates than global motion models.