Iris pattern is one of the most important biological traits of humans. In last years, the iris pattern is used for human verification because of uniqueness of its texture. In this paper, biometric system based iris recognition is designed and implemented using two comparative approaches. The first approach is the Fourier descriptors, in this method the iris features have been extracted in frequency domain, where the low spectrums define the general description of iris pattern, while the high spectrums describes the fine detail. The second approach, the principle component analysis uses statistic technique to select the most important feature values by reducing its dimensionality. The biometric system is tested by applying one-to-one pattern matching procedure for 50 persons. The distance measurement method is applied for Manhattan, Euclidean, and Cosine classifiers for purpose of comparison. In all three classification methods, Fourier descriptors were always advanced principle component analysis in matching results. It satisfied 96%, 94%, and 86% correct matching against 94%, 92%, and 80% for principle component analysis using Manhattan, Euclidean, and Cosine classifiers respectively.