Efficient Terrain Matching With 3-D Zernike Moments

The 3-D Zernike descriptors are investigated for an efficient terrain matching algorithm. The maximum order of the 3-D Zernike moments and the template size are determined. The odd-order descriptors are compared with the even-order ones in sensitivity to terrain elevation fluctuation and robustness to noise and rotation. Numerical experiments show that the matching with the odd-order descriptors can achieve as good as or better than that with both the odd-order and the even-order descriptors.