A computer-implemented method of performing fingerprint based authentication from matching local features represented by binary features which can be matched in an efficient implementation in one or both of software and hardware by computing Hamming distances between the binary features. A local feature in a verification image is said to be matching with a local feature in an enrolment image if the Hamming distance between the binary features falls below a pre-determined threshold. The computer-implemented method retains information about the similarity of local features in the two images and utilities it in an efficient way with the objective of improving fingerprint recognition rates and enabling finger liveness detection. In an aspect a normalized feature similarity distribution is generated as part of the representation in recognition and liveness detection.