It is now a known fact that passwords and tokens are highly susceptible to being stolen or lost. A weak password is the main reason for security and data breaches. Even strong passwords are not able to resist sophisticated hacker attacks. Resetting forgotten or lost passwords require time and hinder the employee productivity. So all this needs to be placed on a more secure technology like biometric.Biometric authentication is a practice of identifying or verifying individuals on the basis of their unique physiological or behavioral characteristics such as iris, gait, fingerprints, facial patterns, DNA, voice patterns, etc. The notion of identifying people on the basis of fingerprints can be traced back to thousands of years. However, it first appeared as an automated technology in the year 1970. The driving force behind the use of biometrics has been convenience besides security. Fingerprint authentication denotes the automated practice of verifying and matching fingerprints of two humans. Fingerprint identification is more popular than other biometric identifications because of its ease in the acquisition, the established use, and collections by immigration and law enforcement agencies and the multiple sources (ten fingers) accessible for collection. The research paper elaborates the key features of fingerprints and the working of Automatic Minutiae Detection algorithm. The paper also highlights the implementation of Matlab code concerning recognition of characteristics of fingerprints. The paper also compares the 2D fingerprint identification with 3D fingerprint identification.