This paper addresses the issue of counterfeit iris detection, which is a liveness detection problem in biometrics. Fake iris mentioned here refers to iris wearing color contact lens with textures printed onto them. We propose three measures to detect fake iris: measuring iris edge sharpness, applying Iris-Texton feature for characterizing the visual primitives of iris textures and using selected features based on co-occurrence matrix (CM). Extensive testing is carried out on two datasets containing different types of contact lens with totally 640 fake iris images, which demonstrates that IrisTexton and CM features are effective and robust in anticounterfeit iris. Detailed comparisons with two stateof-the-art methods in literatures are also presented, showing that the proposed iris edge sharpness measure acquires a comparable performance with these two methods, while Iris-Texton and CM features outperform the state-of-the-art.