The “registration pattern” between two fingerprints is the optimal registration of each part of one fingerprint with respect to the other fingerprint. Registration patterns generated from imposter’s matching attempts are different from those patterns from genuine matching attempts, although they may share some similarities in the aspect of minutiae. This paper presents an algorithm that utilizes minutiae, associate ridges and orientation fields to determine the registration pattern between two fingerprints and their similarity. The proposed matching scheme has two stages. An offline training stage derives a genuine registration pattern base from a set of genuine matching attempts. Then, an online matching stage registers the two fingerprints and determines the registration pattern. Only if the pattern makes a genuine one, a further fine matching is conducted. The genuine registration pattern base is derived using a set of fingerprints extracted from the NIST Special Database 24. Experimental results on the second FVC2002 database demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.