Abstract: To separate the background from the foreground of slap fingerprint images quickly and accurately, an efficient algorithm based on frequency domain analysis was presented：① the coarse separation of foreground from the background based on threeorder cumulant; ② the binarization enhancement based on optimal threshold segmentation of gray histogram distribution; ③ the removal of nonfingerprint texture region based on frequency domain analysis and two decision rules; ④ the region combination based on the center nearest neighbor rule. The experimental results show that the algorithm, which is proven effective by the given examples, has a faster processing speed and superior precision.