This work deals with three related topics in the field of biometric fingerprint recognition. The first topic is devoted to the skin structure and various sensor technologies used for the fingerprint acquirement, namely optical, capacitive, ultrasonic, e-field, electro-optical, pressure, thermal, MEMS and sweep. This is followed by the description of influencing factors which could have an impact on the fingerprint acquirement process, e.g. skin diseases. The second topic covers the issues of estimation of fingerprint image quality. At the beginning, important error rates and curves for the evaluation of biometric system performance are introduced. The last topic deals with the liveness detection. At the beginning, some basic risks related to biometric systems are discussed and the need for liveness detection is explained. This is followed by the description of all known methods for the liveness detection which could be suitably used in the fingerprint recognition.