Problem statement: In any real time biometric system processing speed and recognition time are crucial parameters. Reducing processing time involves many parameters like normalization, FAR, FRR, management of eyelid and eyelash occlusions, size of signature etc. Normalization consumes substantial amount of time of the system. This study contributes for improved iris recognition system with reduced processing time, False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR). Approach: To improve system performance and reliability of a biometric system. It avoided the iris normalization process used traditionally in iris recognition systems. The technique proposed here used different masks to filter out iris image from an eye. Comparative study of different masks was done and optimized mask is proposed. The experiment was carried on CASIA database consisting of 756 iris images of 108 persons. Each person contributes seven images of eye (108×7 = 756) images in the database. Results: In the proposed method: (1) Normalization step is avoided; (2) Computational time is reduced by 0.3342 sec; (3) Iris signature size is reduced; (4) Improved performance parameters. (With reduced feature size, proposed method achieves 99.4866% accuracy, 0.0069% FAR, 1.0198% FRR and significant increase in speed of the system). Conclusion: Iris signature proposed was comparatively small just of 1×24 size. Though Daugman’s method gives best accuracy of 99.90% but the iris signature length used by that algorithm is comparatively very high that is 1×2048 phase vector. Also Daugman has used phase information in signature formation. Our method gives a accuracy of 99.474% with a signature of comparatively very small length. This has definitely contributed to improve the speed.