Two years after the first edition, a new Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC2002) was organized by the authors, with the aim of determining the state-of-the-art in this challenging pattern recognition application. The experience and the feedback received from FVC2000 allowed the authors to improve the organization of FVC2002 and to capture the attention of a significantly higher number of academic and commercial organizations ( 33 algorithms were submitted). This paper discusses the FVC2002 database, the test protocol and the main differences between FVC2000 and FVC2002. The algorithm performance evaluation will be presented at the 16th ICPR.