1. A standoff ocular recognition system comprising: an eye image acquisition module; an image quality evaluation section connected to the eye image acquisition module; an eye recognition section connected to the image quality evaluation section; and a matcher module connected to the eye recognition section; and wherein the eye recognition section comprises a trace transform module for converting eye images into trace space; and wherein the image quality evaluation section is configured to determine if an eye image meets a threshold of quality metrics and eye images deemed not to meet the threshold of quality metrics are converted into trace space and eye images deemed to meet the threshold of quality metrics bypass the trace transform module.