In this paper, a face detection method for interactive TV control system using a new feature, edge histogram feature, with a support vector machine(SVM) in the near-infrared(NIR) images is proposed. The edge histogram feature is extracted using 16-directional edge intensity and a histogram. Compared to the previous method using local binary pattern(LBP) feature, the proposed method using edge histogram feature has better performance in both smaller feature size and lower equal error rate(EER) for face detection experiments in NIR databases.