Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2014 in the subject Computer Science - Applied, Khulna University, course: Mathematics, language: English, abstract: Minutiae based feature extraction methods are used for fingerprint matching. This method is mainly depending on the characteristics of minutiae of the individuals. The minutiae are ridge endings or bifurcations on the fingerprints. Their coordinates and direction are most distinctive features to represent the fingerprint. Most fingerprint matching systems store only the minutiae template in the database for further usage. The conventional methods to utilize minutiae information are treating it as a point set and finding the matched points from different minutiae sets. This kind of minutiae-based fingerprint recognition/matching systems consists of two steps: minutiae extraction and minutiae matching. Image enhancement, histogram equalization, thinning, binarization, smoothing, block direction estimation, image segmantation, ROI extraction etc. are discussed in the minutiae extraction step. After the extraction of minutiae the false minutiae are removed from the extraction to get the accurate result. In the minutiae matching process, the minutiae features of a given fingerprint are compared with the minutiae template and the matched minutiae will be found out. The final template used for fingerprint matching is further utilized in the matching stage to enhance the systems performance. Two fingerprint images always give two different matrices, the matrix equalization method is also used for matching two fingerprint images after the final template.