In an automated iris recognition system, in order to get higher accuracy, we should have an efficient iris segmentation process. The reliability of accurate "iris recognition" system largely depends on the accuracy of segmentation process. Traditional "iris segmentation" methods are unable to detect the exact boundaries of iris and pupil, which is time consuming and also highly sensitive to noise. To overcome these problems, we have proposed an improved Wildes method (IWM) for segmentation in iris recognition system. The proposed algorithm consists of two major steps before applying Wildes method for segmentation: edge detection of iris and pupil from a noisy eye image with improved Canny with fuzzy logic (ICWFL) and removal of unwanted noise from above step with a hybrid restoration fusion filter (HRFF). A comparative study of various edge detection techniques is performed to prove the efficiency of ICWFL method. Similarly, the proposed method is tested with various noise densities from 10 to 95 dB. Also the working of the proposed HRFF is compared with some existing smoothing filters. Various experiments have been performed with the help of iris database of IIT_Delhi. Both visual and numerical results prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.