Minutia based matching scheme is the most widely accepted method for both automated as well as manual (forensic) fingerprint matching. The scenario of comparing a partial fingerprint minutia set against a full fingerprint minutia set is a challenging problem. In this work, we propose a method to register the orientation field of the partial fingerprint minutia set to that of the orientation field of full fingerprint minutia set. As a consequence of registering the partial fingerprint orientation field, we obtain extra information that can augment a minutia based matcher by reducing the search space of minutiae in the full fingerprint. We present the accuracy of our registration algorithm on NIST-SD27 database, reporting separately for both subjective and quantitative quality classification of NIST-SD27. The registration performance accuracy is measured in terms of percentage of ground truth minutiae present in the reduced minutiae search space generated by our algorithm. ©2014 IEEE.