Abstract: The overall performance of iris recognition systems is affected by the quality of acquired iris sample images. Due to the development of imaging technologies, visible wavelength iris recognition gained a lot of attention in the past few years. However, iris sample quality of unconstrained imaging conditions is a more challenging issue compared to the traditional near infrared iris biometrics. Therefore, measuring the quality of such iris images is essential in order to have good quality samples for iris recognition. In this paper, we investigate whether general purpose no-reference image quality metrics can assess visible wavelength iris sample quality.