Background Latent fingerprints are the unintentional impressions that are left at crime scenes, which are considered to be highly significant in forensic analysis and authenticity verification. It is an extremely crucial tool used by law enforcement and forensic agencies for the conviction of criminals. However, due to the accidental nature of these impressions, the quality of prints uplifted is generally inferior. Main body In order to improve the overall fingerprint recognition performance, there is an insistent need to design novel methods to improve the reliability and robustness of the existing techniques. Therefore, a systematic review is presented to study the existing methods for latent fingerprint acquisition, enhancement, reconstruction, and matching, along with various benchmark datasets available for research purposes. Conclusion The paper highlights multiple challenges and research gaps using comparative analysis of existing enhancement, reconstruction and matching approaches in order to augment the research in this direction that has become imperative in this digital era.