In fingerprint database collected in daily life there are ridges and valleys whose widths differ much .An adaptive Gabor based fingerprint enhancement algorithm was proposed to adapt images with different texture sizes.The methods for ridge orientation are improved by the processing on the subimage.Experimental results indicate that calculating orientation image by subimage has the speed and verasity advantages which are obvious on low quality images for the noise-reducing function of wavelet transfermation.Adaptive Gabor filter works better on thinner or thicker fingerprint textures for its better joint of faulted ridges and separation of accretionary ridges.