The technology of fingerprint identification is a convenient, reliable, noninvasive and cheap scheme for biometrics. A method that adopts surface plasmon resonance imaging (SPRI) to collect fingerprints utilizing surface plasmon resonance (SPR) phenomenon is put forward to improve the quality of images in this paper. The principles and the structure of SPRI system are introduced. SPR is stimulated by a Kretschmann prism couple configuration. The cover glass coated with a 50 nm gold film serves as a sensor chip. The fingerprint is then imprinted on the gold film. Polarized monochromatic light is projected on the sensor through the prism, where the SPR phenomenon occurs. The reflected fingerprint image is collected by CCD. The images are collected by SPRI and conventional optic method for the same fingerprint, two different contrast gradients in which the fingerprint ridges are compared with the valleys of the main parts of the two images are 0.2014 and 0.0516 respectively. The contrast and clarity of the image collected by SPRI are much improved.