In this paper, a two-stage multi-category recognition structure based on texture features is proposed. This method can solve the problem of the decline in recognition accuracy in the scene of lightweight training samples. Besides, the problem of recognition effect different in the same recognition structure caused by the unsteady iris can also be solved. In this paper’s structure, digitized values of the edge shape in the iris texture of the image are set as the texture trend feature, while the differences between the gray values of the image obtained by convolution are set as the grayscale difference feature. Furthermore, the texture trend feature is used in the first-stage recognition. The template category that does not match the tested iris is the elimination category, and the remaining categories are uncertain categories. Whereas, in the second-stage recognition, uncertain categories are adopted to determine the iris recognition conclusion through the grayscale difference feature. Then, the experiment results using the JLU iris library show that the method in this paper can be highly efficient in multi-category heterogeneous iris recognition under lightweight training samples and unsteady state.