Abstract: A wave matching based algorithm for fingerprint image frame series mosaicking is proposed to obtain a complete fingerprint image.In this algorithm,part of the frame is selected as reference region to extract wave information.Based on wave comparability,a stepwise refinement strategy is adopted to calculate the parameters in three sequential stages.Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can rapidly obtain correct mosaicking image with low computational cost.The algorithm is especially suitable for those automated fingerprint identification systems(AFIS) where the computational resource is extremely constrained.