In this paper, the footprint test theory and technique's development and application and the future developing direction is summarily introduced firstly, and the footprint's structure characteristic and measure methods and its important action in footprint test are emphatically discussed, then the basic concept, basic theory and basic method of digital image processing and pattern recognition and its application in practice are mainly introduced, the automatic processing and recognition method of footprint are emphatically discussed at last.It mainly includes the following five aspects:First, according to the character of footprint image, the multi-scale morphological reconstructing filtering algorithm based on area condition dilatation is proposed. In this algorithm, a connected operation which acts on gray image and isn't idempotent, this operation can be considered as multi-scale filtering rule. Then utilizing the biggest tree structure describes the plane area of gray image and their correlation, according to the defined rule to filter the gray image. Because morphological reconstructing filtering combine plane areas and change their gray value only through connected operation, so, when filtering noise and simplifying image, the edges and contours of image are protected well, especially multi-scale morphological reconstructing filtering can filter the noises in different scale space, hence the filtering effect is better. At last, through the reconstruction to the biggest tree, the filtered image is output. Lots of experiments show that this method can get very good effect in footprint image filtering.Second, according to the characteristics of footprint image, the footprint edge extracting method based on gray level-gradient 2-D threshold vector image segmentation is presented.This method enables the segmentation of images by using auto-developed gray level-gradient 2-D threshold vector ,and acquires high anti-noise