This paper present a new method based on Chaos Genetic Algorithm (CGA) to localize the human iris in a given image. First, the iris image is preprocessed to estimate the range of the iris localization, and then CGA is used to extract the boundary of the iris. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms is efficient and robust, and can achieve sub pixel precision. Because Genetic Algorithms (GAs) can search in a large space, the algorithm does not need accurate estimation of iris center for subsequent localization, and hence can lower the requirement for original iris image processing. On this point, the present localization algirithm is superior to Daugmans algorithm.