Abstract. An eye contour extraction method which combines a simplied version of Active Shape Model(ASM) with a gradient method is proposed. Considering the large amount of calculations required by ASM, it is only used to extract eyelids. As iris is considered to have some more regular shape, the detection of iris is done by the simple but fast gradient method, which is improved by introducing gradient value to the weight matrix. Our detection method has been implemented in the C programming language and experimental results shows good accuracy and efficiency.