We describe and analyze the performance of a non-ideal iris recognition system. The system is designed to process non-ideal iris images in two steps: (i) estimation of the gaze direction and (ii) processing and encoding of the rotated iris image. We use two objective functions to estimate the gaze direction: Hamming distance and Daugman’s integro-differential operator and determine an estimated angle by picking the value that optimizes the selected objective function. After the angle is estimated, the off-angle iris image undergoes geometric transformations involving the estimated angle and is further processed as if it were a frontal view image. The encoding technique developed in this work is based on application of the global Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to masked iris images. We use two datasets: CASIA dataset and a special dataset of offangle iris images collected at WVU to verify the performance of the encoding technique and angle estimator, respectively. A series of Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROCs) demonstrates various effects on the performance of the non-ideal iris based recognition system implementing the global ICA encoding.