To solve the problem of present iris location,a new iris location algorithm based on multi-scale local-direction contour detection is proposed.The multi-scale local-direction contour of iris image is decomposed by gabor wavelet,then the obvious vertical contour is reconstructed by selecting multiple scales and local directions coefficients.The binary image of main exterior iris contour is chose based on the location parameters of the iris inner contour,then the coarse exterior iris parameters are obtained based on the standard Hough transform.In order to improve the accuracy of iris location,the center and radius are decided accurately in a small scope by using Hough transform again.Comparative simulation results show that the performance of speed and robust is better than the existed method.