This paper gives an overview of the NICE.I : Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation -Part I contest. This contest differs from others in two fundamental points. First, instead of the complete iris recognition process, it exclusively evaluates the iris segmentation and noise detection stages, allowing the independent evaluation of one of the main recognition error sources. Second, it operates on highly noisy images that were captured to simulate less constrained imaging environments and constitute the second version of the UBIRIS database (UBIRIS.v2).