We proposea new ngerprint imagecompressionscheme based on the hybrid model of image. Our scheme uses the essential steps of a typical automated ngerprint identi cation system (AFIS) such as enhancement, binarization and thinning to encode ngerprint images. The decoding process is based on reconstructing a hybrid surface 9] by using the gray values on ridges and valleys. In this compression scheme, the ridge skeleton is coded e ciently by using di erential chain codes. Valley skeleton is derived from ridge skeleton and the gray values along the ridge and valley skeletons are encoded using discrete cosine transform. The error between original and replica is also encoded to increase quality. One advantage of our approach is that original features such as end points and bifurcation points can be extracted directly from compressed image even for a very high compression ratio. Another advantage is that the proposed scheme can be integrated to a typical AFIS easily. The algorithm has been ap...