The present invention disclose an iris recognition method, which utilizes a matching pursuit algorithm to simplify the extraction and reconstruction of iris features and reduce the memory space required by each iris feature vector without the penalty of recognition accuracy. The iris recognition method of the present invention comprises an iris-localization component and a pattern matching component. The iris-localization component locates the iris region via the color difference between different portions of the eyeball. The primary iris features are extracted from iris information and transformed into a sequence of iris feature vectors by a matching pursuit algorithm. Thus, the iris image can be represented by a sequence of atoms, and each atom contains base, amplitude and location. Then, the comparison between the feature vectors of two irises is performed to determine whether the two irises match.