This paper presents a new approach based on morphological operators for application of biometric identification of individuals by segmentation and analysis of the iris. Algorithms based on morphological operators are developed to segment the iris region from the eye image and also to highlight chosen iris patterns. The extracted features are used to represent and characterize the iris. In order to properly extract the desired patterns, an algorithm is proposed to produce skeletons with unique paths among end-points and nodes. The representation obtained by the morphological processing is stored for identification purposes. To illustrate the efficiency of the morphological approach some results are presented. The proposed system was derived to present low complexity implementation and low storage requirements.