Radio frequency based device-free passive localization has been actively studied. An important issue with this technique is that a large amount of sensor nodes are usually deployed in localization environments, causing high deployment cost, high computation complexity and other drawbacks. To reduce the number of nodes while maintaining high localization accuracy, this paper proposes a fingerprint-based node deployment mechanism, which saves hardware cost, speeds up node deployment process as well as maintains a similar accuracy. The experiments are conducted in two environments with considerably different sizes of 150 m2and 25 m2. Maintaining the accuracies above 95%, the proposed mechanism can efficiently reduce the total number of nodes in large room by 54.55% and in small room by 68.75%. Especially, the localization response time sharply reduces by 93.08% in the large room and 79.87% in the small room.