Iris recognition has been regarded as one of the most reliable biometric systems over the past years. Previous studies have shown that the performance of iris recognition systems highly dependent on the performance of their segmentation algorithms. Iris segmentation is the process to isolate the iris region from the surrounded structures of the eye image. However, several iris segmentation algorithms have been developed in the literature, but their segmentation and recognition accuracies drastically degrade with non-ideal iris images acquired in less constrained conditions. Thus, it is crucial to develop a new iris segmentation method to improve iris recognition using non-ideal images. Hence, the objective of this paper is an iris segmentation method on the basis of optimization to isolate the iris region from non-ideal iris images such those affected by reflections, blurred boundaries, eyelids occlusion, and gaze-deviation. Experimental results on the off axis/angle West Virginia University (WVU) iris database demonstrated the superiority of the developed method over state-of-the-art iris segmentation methods considered in this paper. The performance of an iris recognition algorithm based on the developed iris segmentation method was observed to be improved.