The invention discloses a method and device for acquiring direction fields of overlapped fingerprints. The method includes the following steps that effective areas of the fingerprints are calibrated, images are partitioned, discrete Fourier transformation is conduced on the partitioned images, low-frequency components are filtered, extreme point pairs of frequency domain amplitude are looked for, and the initial direction fields of the partitioned images are acquired according to the extreme point pairs; matrix modeling is conducted on the initial direction fields of the partitioned images in the overlapped effective areas, relevant matrixes are calculated, initial marked probability matrixes are set, then, random marking, response calculation, marked probability matrix update and convergence judgment are sequentially iteratively conducted, and eventually the separated independent direction fields of the two fingerprints are acquired; the independent effective areas and the separated independent direction fields are combined, and then the separated direction fields of the fingerprints are acquired by selecting one combination mode. The device comprises a calibration module, an initial direction field estimation module, an independent direction field separation module and a combination selection module. The method and device for acquiring the direction fields of the overlapped fingerprints have the advantages of being high in separation quality of the overlapped fingerprints, good in accuracy of ridge detection, and wide in application range.