Iris is one of the common biometrics used for identity authentication. It has the potential to recognize
persons with a high degree of assurance. Extracting effective features is the most important stage in the
iris recognition system. Different features have been used to perform iris recognition system. A lot of
them are based on hand-crafted features designed by biometrics experts. According to the achievement of
deep learning in object recognition problems, the features learned by the Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN) have gained great attention to be used in the iris recognition system. In this paper, we proposed
an effective iris recognition system by using transfer learning with Convolutional Neural Networks. The
proposed system is implemented by fine-tuning a pre-trained convolutional neural network (VGG-16) for
features extracting and classification. The performance of the iris recognition system is tested on four
public databases IITD, iris databases CASIA-Iris-V1, CASIA-Iris-thousand and, CASIA-Iris-Interval. The
results show that the proposed system is achieved a very high accuracy rate.