The objective of this paper is to develop an algorithm for a real-time automatic fingerprint recognition system. The algorithm employs the wavelet transform(WT) and the dominat local orientation that derived from the gradient Gaussian(GoG) and coherence in determining the directions of ridges in fingerprint images. By using the WT, the algorithm does not require conventional preprocessing procedures such as smothing, binarization, thining and restoration. For recognition, two fingerprint images are compared in three different ST domains;one that represents the original image compressed to quarter(LL), another that shows vertical directional characteristic(LH), and third as the block that contains horizontal direction(HL) in WT domain. Each block has dominat local orientation that derived from the GoG and coherence. The proposed algorithm is imprlemented on a SunSparc-2 workstation under X-window environment. Our simulation results, in real-time have shown that while the rate of Type II error-Incorrect recognition of two identical fingerprints as the identical fingerprints-is held at 0%, the rate of Type I error-Incorrect recognitionof two identical fingerprints as the different ones-is 2.5%.