Methods and systems for high-speed filtering of candidate fingerprint images in a gallery using a non-reference-point based matching involving histograms of tokens representing minutia data. The method or system may involve detecting minutia patterns in a probe image, defining tokens that represent the minutia patterns detected in the probe image, measuring a degree of similarity between the probe image and each gallery image by comparing a probability of occurrence of a set of the tokens defined for the probe image with a probability of occurrence of the same set of tokens in that gallery image, and identifying as a candidate for a match to the probe image each gallery image for which the measured degree of similarity satisfies a criterion.