  We generalize the technique of Lada et al. (1994) to map dust column density
through a molecular cloud (NICE) to an optimized multi-band technique (NICER)
that can be applied to any multi-band survey of molecular clouds. We present a
first application to a ~625 deg^2 subset of the Two Micron All Sky Survey
(2MASS) data and show that when compared to NICE, the optimized NICER technique
(i) achieves the same extinction peak values, (ii) improves the noise variance
of the map by a factor of 2 and (iii) is able to reach 3 \sigma dust extinction
measurements as low as A_V = 0.5 magnitudes, better than or equivalent to
classical optical star count techniques and below the threshold column density
for the formation of CO, the brightest H2 tracer in radio-spectroscopy
techniques. The application of the NICER techniques to near-infrared data
obtained with a 8 meter-class telescope with a state-of-the-art NIR camera,
such as the VLT-ISAAC combination, will be able to achieve dynamic ranges from
below 10^21 protons cm^-2 to over 10^23 protons cm^-2 (A_V in the range [0.3,
60]) and spatial resolutions < 10'', making use of a single and straightforward
column density tracer, extinction by interstellar dust.
