Biometric recognition refers to the use of biological characteristics for identification and verification of individuals. Use of biometric is increasing nowadays because biometric characteristics are difficult to replicate and lifelong. Applications which require only the authorized persons to access the resources are information systems, National id systems, voter and driver registrations, documentations, military area and ATMs. Among all biometrics, fingerprints is the most widely used and

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... epted by the user as the acquisition of fingerprint image is minimally invasive and require little hardware. Traditional fingerprint identification algorithm based on Minutiae Extraction, Discrete cosine transform(DCT) and fast Fourier transform require so much computation. Wavelet based algorithm do not require any preprocessing and post processing steps and hence is the key for low cost fingerprint identification system. This paper presents the overview of different fingerprint recognition system. In comparison to older fingerprint recognition system that is based on minutiae and FFT, the wavelet based system has high recognition rates.