In this paper, we propose an effective fingerprint matching algorithm based on ridge count matching and minutiae subset combination. In the algorithm, the orientation-based ridge patterns are first utilized to remove the spuriously matched minutiae pairs. Then the reliable ridge counts between every two minutiae are estimated to improve the minutiae relationship, and finally the matched minutiae subsets corresponding to different alignments are selectively combined to reduce the influence caused by distortions in fingerprints. Experimental results on NIST-4 show that our method achieves a much better matching performance.