A new iris segmentation and recognition method is described. Combining a statistical classification and elastic boundary fitting, the iris is first segmented robustly and accurately. Once the iris is segmented, one-dimensional signals are computed in the iris and decomposed into multiple frequency bands. Each decomposed signal is approximated by a piecewise linear curve connecting a small set of node points. The node points represent features of each signal. The similarity measture between two iris images is the normalized cross-correlation coefficients between simplified signals.