Recently, many researchers have been interested in biometric systems such as fingerprint, handwriting, key-stroke patterns and human iris. From the viewpoint of reliability and robustness, iris recognition is the most attractive biometric system. Moreover, the iris recognition system is a comfortable biometric system, since the video image of an eye can be taken at a distance. In this paper, we discuss human iris recognition, which is based on accurate iris localization, robust feature extraction, and Neural Network classification. The iris region is accurately localized in the eye image using a multiresolution active snake model. For the feature representation, the localized iris image is decomposed using wavelet transform based on dyadic Haar wavelet. Experimental results show the usefulness of wavelet transform in comparison to conventional Gabor transform. In addition, we present a new method for setting initial weight vectors in competitive learning. The proposed initialization method yields better accuracy than the conventional method.