Large volumes of fingerprint are collected and stored every day in a wide range of applications, including forensics and access control. Due to the large number and size of fingerprint images, data compression has to be applied to reduce the storage and communication bandwidth requirements of those images. Obtaining an over complete dictionary from a set of fingerprint patches allows us to represent them as a sparse linear combination of dictionary atoms. In the algorithm, we first construct a dictionary for predefined fingerprint image patches. For a new given fingerprint images, represent its patches according to the dictionary by computing minimization and then quantize and encode the representation. In this abstract, we consider the effect of various factors on compression results. Three groups of fingerprint images are tested. The experiments demonstrate that our algorithm is efficient compared with several competing compression techniques (JPEG, JPEG 2000, and WSQ), especially at high compression ratios. The experiments also illustrate that the proposed algorithm is robust to extract minutiae.