Accurate calculation of high order pseudo-Zernike moments and their numerical stability

•An accurate calculation of pseudo Zernike moments is described which reduces geometric and numerical integration errors.•Significant improvement in rotation and scale invariance is observed.•It is shown that geometric and numerical integration errors can be removed simultaneously.

The accuracy of pseudo-Zernike moments (PZMs) suffers from various errors, such as the geometric error, numerical integration error, and discretization error. Moreover, the high order moments are vulnerable to numerical instability. In this paper, we present a method for the accurate calculation of PZMs which not only removes the geometric error and numerical integration error, but also provides numerical stability to PZMs of high orders. The geometric error is removed by taking the square-grids and arc-grids, the ensembles of which maps exactly the circular domain of PZMs calculation. The Gaussian numerical integration is used to eliminate the numerical integration error. The recursive methods for the calculation of pseudo-Zernike polynomials not only reduce the computation complexity, but also provide numerical stability to high order moments. A simple computational framework to implement the proposed approach is also discussed. Detailed experimental results are presented which prove the accuracy and numerical stability of PZMs.