This article is an overview of a current research based on fingerprint recognition system. In this paper we highlighted on the previous studies of fingerprint recognition system. This paper is a brief review in the conceptual and structure of fingerprint recognition. The basic fingerprint recognition system consists of four stages: firstly, the sensor which is used for enrolment & recognition to capture the biometric data. Secondly, the pre-processing stage which is used to remove unwanted data and increase the clarity of ridge structure by using enhancement technique. Thirdly, feature extraction stage which take the input from the output of the pre-processing stage to extract the fingerprint features. Fourthly, the matching stage is to compare the acquired feature with the template in the database. Finally, the database which stores the features for the matching stags. The aim of this paper is to review various recently work on fingerprint recognition system and explain fingerprint recognition stages step by step and give summaries of fingerprint databases with characteristics.