Unlike traditional minutiae-based fingerprint matching approach, which establishes the minutiae correspondence between two fingerprints, in this paper a novel ridge-based fingerprint matching algorithm, which establishes the exact ridge correspondence between two fingerprints is proposed. The ridge correspondence is called ‘exact’ because correspondences between points on ridges are also established. The matching score is computed as the ratio of the length of matched ridges to that of all ridges. Experimental results on FVC2002 databases show that the ridge matching approach performs comparably to minutiae-based one, and an obvious improvement on matching performance can be obtained by combining the two matchers.