Fingerprints are one of the oldest and most widely used biometric security measures. Rapid advances in Computer Science and digital Image Processing have made it possible to design various Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) which can compare certain features of an input fingerprint image with a series of template images stored in a database and find a match. This paper deals with the extraction of certain specific features from a fingerprint, called minutiae. Since low quality images tend to generate multiple false minutiae, a method has been included to detect and remove such false minutiae. Fingerprint matching is performed by matching the number and type of the minutiae. The false minutiae removal process helps to reduce the computational complexity and improve the accuracy of the match.