In fact, we used first 20 principal components for iris recognition system as they provided 80–90 % of total variations. Hence 2DPCA method reduced the dimension of iris image by selecting the only highest significant eigenvalues and its corresponding eigenvectors. 2DPCA is performed on segmented iris images to reduce the dimension by taking the significant principal components. The iris features obtained from the 2DPCA process are projected onto a lower dimension sub space.