Our multimodal biometric system combines fingerprinting with a top-view finger image captured by a CCD camera without user intervention. The greyscale image is preprocessed to enhance its edges, skin furrows, and the nail shape before being manipulated by a bank of oriented filters. A square tessellation is applied to the filtered image to create a feature map, called a NailCode, which is employed in Euclidean distance computations. The NailCode reduces system errors by 17.68% in the verification mode, and by 6.82% in the identification mode.