The objective of this paper is to develop an algorithm for a real-time automatic fingerprint recognition system. The algorithm employs the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in determining the directions of ridges in fingerprint images, and utilizes statistical information in recognizing the fingerprints. The information used in fingerprint recognition is based on the dircetions along ridge curves and characteristic points such as core points and delta points. In order to find ridge directions, the algorithm applies the FFT to a small block of the size 8x8 pixels, and decides the directions by interpreting the resulted Fourier spectrum. By using the FFT, the algorithm does not require conventional preprocessing procedures such as smoothing, binarization, thinning, and restorationl. Finally, in matching two fingerprint images, the algorithm searches and compares two kinds of feature blocks, one as the blocks where the dircetions cannot be defined from the Fourier spectrum, and the other as the blocks where the changes of directions become abrupt. The proposed algorithm has been implemented on a SunSparc-2 workstation under the Open Window environment. In the experiment, the proposed algorithm has been applied to a set of fingerprint images obtained by a prism system. The result has shown that while the rate of Type II error - Incorrect recognition of two different fingerprints as the identical fingerprints - is held at 0.0%, the rate of Type I error - Incorrect recognition of two identical fingerprints as the different ones - is 2.2%.