Nowadays iris recognition has become a promising biometric for human identification and authentication. In this case, feature extraction from near-infrared (NIR) iris images under less-constraint environments is rather challenging to identify an individual accurately. This paper extends a texture descriptor to represent the local spatial patterns. The iris texture is first divided into several blocks from which the shape and appearance of intrinsic iris patterns are extracted with the help of block-based Local Binary Patterns (LBPb). The concepts of uniform, rotation, and invariant patterns are employed to reduce the length of feature space. Additionally, the simplicity of the image descriptor allows for very fast feature extraction. The recognition is performed using a supervised machine learning classifier with various distance metrics in the extracted feature space as a dissimilarity measure. The proposed approach effectively deals with lighting variations, blur focuses on misaligned images and elastic deformation of iris textures. Extensive experiments are conducted on the largest and most publicly accessible CASIA-v4 distance image database. Some statistical measures are computed as performance indicators for the validation of classification outcomes. The area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves is illustrated to compare the diagnostic ability of the classifier for the LBP and its extensions. The experimental results suggest that the LBPb is more effective than other rotation invariants and uniform rotation invariants in local binary patterns for distant iris recognition. The Braycurtis distance metric provides the highest possible accuracy compared to other distance metrics and competitive methods.