The present invention applies to the field of biometric identification technologies and provides a method and an apparatus for fingerprint identification. The method includes: extracting a minutia of the input fingerprint image by using a statistical method; performing fingerprint matching according to the extracted minutia to obtain a fingerprint identification result. According to the method provides in embodiments of the present invention, the direction of the minutia is calculated by using statistical information, a descriptor with statistical significance is added for the minutia, and during the matching process, calculation of the similarity of the minutia by using the descriptor and region matching by using information of the direction field and the gradient field of the overlapping region are added, therefore, instability and weak specificity of expression of fingerprint characteristics in a conventional algorithm are avoided, and accuracy of the fingerprint identification is improved.