This paper aims at faster processing and retrieval in fingerprint identification systems by reducing the amount of preprocessing and the size of the feature vector. The distribution of fingerprint directions is a set of local directions of ridges and furrows in small overlapped blocks in a fingerprint image. It is extracted initially as a set of 8-direction components through the Gabor filter bank. The discontinuous distribution of directions is smoothed to a continuous one and visualized as a direction image. Then the center of the distribution is selected as a reference point. A feature vector is composed of 192 sine values of the ridge angles at 32-equiangular positions with 6 different distances from the reference point in the direction image. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm performs the same level of correct identification as a conventional algorithm does, while speeding up the overall processing significantly by reducing the length of the feature vector.