Noise reduction is a necessary procedure for the iris recognition systems. This paper proposes an adaptive fuzzy switching noise reduction (AFSNR) filter to reduce noise for iris pattern recognition. The proposed low complexity AFSNR filter removes noise pixels by fuzzy switching between an adaptive median filter and the filling method. The threshold values of AFSNR filter are calculated on the basis of the histogram statistics of eyelashes, pupils, eyelids, and light illumination. The experimental results on the CASIA V3.0 iris database, with genuine acceptance rate equals 99.72%, show the success of the proposed method.