Distorted fingerprint matching is an important but difficult problem for automatic fingerprint recognition system. To cope with it

we propose a novel approach for distorted fingerprint matching via stable region (SR). By means of SR

the issue to match two fingerprints is tactfully converted to a search and find the corresponding SRs in the fingerprints. Through a three-step procedure which consists of construction

confirmation and expansion

corresponding minutiae are matched in different spatial scales from points to local structures and in different kinds of distorted regions from linear to nonlinear. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with FVC2004 database

and the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has excellent performance and is strongly robust to nonlinear distortion.