To reduce the influence of eyelash noise and improve discriminability in iris recognition, a detection of eyelash occlusions method based on the canny method was presented for the iris recognition. The parameters in canny method were researched. One sector in the outer circularity of iris is used to represent the region of eyelash occlusions. Excluding the pupil and the sector, the rest of the outer circularity is the effective region of iris. Our experimental results demonstrate that the sector contains all eyelash pixels in the outer circularity. The algorithm can detect the eyelash effectively and can improve the classification and discriminability of iris patterns and the rate of iris recognition.