I am working on pattern recognition program using R/python. What would be the best way to compare two or more figures and identify/recognize the similar or duplicate figures based on pattern recognition?
There are lots of papers on the internet, we can try to get the idea how to extract and process feature in a fingerprint. For instance, http://www.cse.unr.edu/~bebis/CS790Q/PaperPresentations/MinutiaeDetection.pdf
Then you can use whatever classifier you want such as support vector machine.
If you need more idea you can visit http://dermatoglyphics.org/11-basic-patterns-of-fingerprint/ to generalize