  We present deep H-band surface photometry and analysis of 40 Local Volume
galaxies, a sample primarily composed of dwarf irregulars in the Cen A group,
obtained using the IRIS2 detector at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope. We
probe to a surface brightness of ~25 mag arcsec$^{-2}$, reaching a 40 times
lower stellar density than the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). Employing
extremely careful and rigorous cleaning techniques to remove contaminating
sources, we perform surface photometry on 33 detected galaxies deriving the
observed total magnitude, effective surface brightness and best fitting
S\'ersic parameters. We make image quality and surface photometry comparisons
to 2MASS and VISTA Hemispheric Survey (VHS) demonstrating that deep targeted
surveys are still the most reliable means of obtaining accurate surface
photometry. We investigate the B-H colours with respect to mass for Local
Volume galaxies, finding that the colours of dwarf irregulars are significantly
varied, eliminating the possibility of using optical-NIR colour transformations
to facilitate comparison to the more widely available optical data sets. The
structure-luminosity relationships are investigated for our `clean' sample of
dwarf irregulars. We demonstrate that a significant fraction of the Local
Volume dwarf irregular population have underlying structural properties similar
to both Local Volume and Virgo Cluster dwarf ellipticals. Linear regressions to
structure-luminosity relationships for the Local Volume galaxies and Virgo
Cluster dwarf ellipticals show significant differences in both slope and
scatter around the established trend lines, suggesting that environment might
regulate the structural scaling relationships of dwarf galaxies in comparison
to their more isolated counterparts.
