Identifying the minutiae correspondences between two fingerprints is crucial for minutiae-based fingerprint matching. With respect to the matter

this paper proposes a new algorithm for fast reference minutiae pair selection to alignment the minutiae set. Introducing the ridge information into the selection process and finding a novel net structure

we specify the most similar pairs based on each of these net structure pairs. Experiments on two sets of fingerprint images show that the proposed algorithm is fast with high accuracy.