A new approach to overcome the problem caused by illumination variation in face recognition is proposed in this paper. Active Near-Infrared (Near-IR) illumination projected by a Light Emitting Diode (LED) light source is used to provide a constant illumination. The difference between two face images captured when the LED light is on and off respectively, is the image of a face under just the LED illumination, and is independent of ambient illumination. In preliminary experiments with various ambient illuminations, significantly better results are achieved for both automatic and semi-automatic face recognition experiments on LED illuminated faces than on face images under ambient illuminations.