Fingerprints have been an invaluable tool for law enforcement and forensics for over a century, motivating research into automated fingerprint based identification in the early 1960's. More recently, fingerprints have found an application in the emerging industry of biometric systems. Biometrics is the automatic identification of an individual based on physiological or behavioral characteristics. Due to its security related applications and the current world political climate, biometrics is presently the subject of intense research by private and academic institutions. Fingerprints are emerging as the most common and trusted biometric for personal identification. However, despite decades of intense research there are still significant challenges for the developers of automated fingerprint verification systems. This thesis includes an examination of all major stages of the fingerprint verification process, with contributions made at each step. The primary focus is upon fingerprint registration, which is the challenging problem of aligning two prints in order to compare their corresponding features for verification. A hierarchical approach is proposed consisting of three stages, each of which employs novel features and techniques for alignment. Experimental results show that the hierarchical approach is robust and outperforms competing state-of-the-art registration methods from the literature. However, despite its power, like most algorithms it has limitations. Therefore, a novel method of information fusion at the registration level has been developed. The technique dynamically selects registration parameters from a set of competing algorithms using a statistical framework. This allows for the relative advantages of different approaches to be exploited. The results show a significant improvement in alignment accuracy for a wide variety of fingerprint databases. Given a robust alignment of two fingerprints, it still remains to be verified whether or not they have originated from the same finger. This is a non-trivial problem, and a close examination of fingerprint features available for this task is conducted with extensive experimental results.