  Massive, large scale star counts in the J band provided by the Deep Near
Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky (DENIS) are used for the first time to draw
out an extinction map of the Chamaeleon I dark cloud. We derived a 2 arcminutes
resolution map of the cloud from J star counts within an area of 1.5 x 3 degres
around the centre of the cloud using an adaptive grid method and applying a
wavelet decomposition. A comparison of our extinction map with the cold
contribution of the IRAS 100 microns emission shows an almost perfect matching.
It is shown that J star counts supersede optical counts on Schmidt plate where
Av > 4.
