An iris recognition system based on Convolutional Neural Network with Particle Swarm Optimization (CNN-PSO) was developed to improve the identified hitches in the existing systems. Iris images of 150 and 108 persons were acquired from LAUIRIS (Nigeria) and CASIA (China) respectively. The images were resized and cropped after which Hough transform was used for effective localization of the iris region and normalised using Daugman’s rubber sheet model, while an efficient Cumulative Sum-based analysis method was used to extract discriminative features from the normalised iris images after which the iris code was generated. The iris code generated in a vector form was optimised with PSO after which they are fed into Convolutional neural network; the same procedure was engaged during enrolment and authentication to generate the iris template. Euclidean distance was used for decision making on test sample template and stored template. The system was implemented with MATLAB R2013a. The performance of the developed system was evaluated on LAURIS and CASIA, and compared with the existing systems (CNN, BPNN-PSO and BPNN) using False Acceptance Rate (FAR), False Rejection Rate (FRR) and Recognition Rate (RR). CNN-PSO has the highest recognition rate of 98.67% and 97.22% for LAUIRIS and CASIA respectively among the systems which showed an improvement over other three recognition technique. The developed CNN-PSO has not only produced an improved Iris recognition system over the others, with the highest recognition rate for both datasets but it also provides a significant recognition rate of black Iris images despite the limitations identified with black Iris images in separating Iris image from other part of the eyes. The developed