Abstract. A common problem in fingerprint recognition is the existence of false minutiae which increase both FAR and FRR in fingerprint matching. In this paper, a robust minutiae postprocessing algorithm is proposed. Unlike most algorithms which use simple distance and connectivity criterions for postprocessing, we also used orientation and flow of ridges as the key factor for postprocessing to avoid eliminating true minutiae while postprocessing. It is shown by the experiments that our postprocessing algorithm improves the minutiae extraction accuracy and the performance of the matching process.