(eng): As a primary modality in biometrics, human face recognition has been employed widely in the computer vision domain because of its performance in a wide range of applications such as surveillance systems and forensics. Recently, near infrared (NIR) imagery has been used in many face recognition systems because of the high robustness to illumination changes in the acquired images. Even though some surveys have been conducted in this infrared domain, they have focused on thermal infrared methods rather than NIR methods. Furthermore, none of the previous infrared surveys provided comprehensive and critical analyses of NIR methods. Therefore, this paper presents an up-to-date survey of the wellknown NIR methods that are used to solve the problem of illumination. The paper includes a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of various NIR methods. Finally, the most promising avenues for future research are highlighted.