1. A standoff iris recognition system comprising: an iris image acquisition module; an image quality evaluator connected to the iris image acquisition module; and an adaptive iris matching module connected to the image quality evaluator and the eye image acquisition module; and wherein the image quality evaluator determines if an eye image from the iris image acquisition module has a quality which is too low for a non-adaptive iris matching module and is sufficiently high enough for the adaptive iris matching module; and wherein if the quality is high enough for the adaptive iris matching module, the adaptive iris matching module executes a search and generates a list of possible matches without segmenting a circumferential of an iris of the eye image.