This paper proposes a novel and distortion-tolerant fingerprint verification technique based on multistage minutia matching. In the first stage, the local similarities of minutiae between two fingerprints are evaluated by matching their local orientation fields and local minutiae topologic structures. In the second stage, the top 5 minutia pairs obtained in the first matching stage are used as the reference minutiae pairs to align two minutia sets, and a set of matched minutia pairs is obtained by matching the aligned two minutia sets. In the third stage, the set of matched pairs obtained in the second stage are matched again by matching two global topologic structures constructed based on the set of matched pairs. The final matching score is obtained based on the set of matched pairs obtained in the second matching stage and the separate matching scores calculated in three stages. Experiments on database of FVC2002 show that this fingerprint matching technique is effective.