Identification of people using different biometric data is becoming more important in network society. Biometrics include voice, ears, palms, fingerprints, faces, iris, retina, and hand shapes. Among these features, iris detection gets more attention because each iris type is unique and does not change throughout life. In this study, an iris recognition framework is proposed using deformable circular hollow kernels and uniform histogram fusion images (UHFIs). This system introduces two different approaches for the iris recognition: one with image matching without machine learning and the other one with machine learning. In the first approach, image matching through Gabor features is employed. After getting the circularly cropped UHFI, Gabor features are extracted and employed in the image matching-based recognition system. In addition, a normalized cross-correlation coefficient is used as a similarity metric to compare the Gabor feature vectors. In the second approach, Gabor feature images are extracted and employed in deep learning (DL). According to the experimental results, the proposed system reaches around 89% accuracy on MMU1, 86% accuracy on MMU2, and about 50% accuracy on the CASIAV3 and CASIAV4 datasets when no machine learning is employed. Extensive benchmarking results also indicate that the proposed system boosts the performance of conventional systems by at least around 40% in terms of accuracy in the absence of machine learning. However, in the presence of machine learning, experimental results show that the proposed method with DL achieves an accuracy of up to 100% for MMU1, MMU2, CASIAV3, and CASIAV4 datasets.