  This paper presents an effective fingerprint classification method designed
based on a hierarchical agglomerative clustering technique. The performance of
the technique was evaluated in terms of several real-life datasets and a
significant improvement in reducing the misclassification error has been
noticed. This paper also presents a query based faster fingerprint search
method over the clustered fingerprint databases. The retrieval accuracy of the
search method has been found effective in light of several real-life databases.
