The popular methods to check the identity of individuals include passwords and ID cards. These conventional method for user identification and authentication are not altogether reliable because they can be stolen and forgotten. As an alternative of the existing methods, biometric technology has been paid much attention for the last few decades. In this paper, we propose an efficient system for recognizing the identity of a living person by analyzing iris patterns which have a high level of stability and distinctiveness than other biometric measurements. The proposed system is based on wavelet transform and a competitive neural network with the improved mechanisms. After preprocessing the iris data acquired through a CCD camera, feature vectors are extracted by using Haar wavelet transform. LVQ(Learning Vector Quantization) is exploited to classify these feature vectors. We improve the overall performance of the proposed system by optimizing the size of feature vectors and by introducing an efficient initialization of the weight vectors and a new method for determining the winner in order to increase the recognition accuracy of LVQ. From the experiments, we confirmed that the proposed system has a great potential of being applied to real applications in an efficient and effective way.