An optical system for iris pattern recognition of the human eye is designed. The lens system is triplet type, and characterized to minimize longitudinal chromatic aberration and Petzval sum. The distance from object to image is 200 mm-300 mm and the effective focal length is 50 mm. Performance of the imaging system is assessed by calculating the ray-fan and spot diagram for Fraunhofer C, d and F line for object height 0 mm, 4 mm and 6 mm. Furthermore, MTFs are calculated. All of the spot sizes are less than 0.05 mm in diameter. The MTF values are higher than 0.5 in the spatial frequency range up to 20 lines/mm for all of the object heights. ights.