In this paper, we extend the concept of the optimal similarity measure, originally developed for Zernike moments (ZMs) which belong to a class of orthogonal rotation invariant moments (ORIMs), to angular radial transform (ART) which is non-orthogonal. The proposed distance measure not only uses the magnitude of the ART coefficients but also incorporates phase component unlike the existing L 1 -distance and L 2 -distance measures which use only the magnitude of ART in image matching problems. Experimental results show that the new distance measure outperforms L 2 -distance measure. The performance of the proposed method is highly robust to Gaussian noise and salt-and-pepper noise even at very high level of noise. The results are compared with the ZMs-based optimal similarity measure. It is shown that the recognition rate of the proposed distance measure is comparable to that of the ZMs, however, at very low computational complexity. 
A noise resistant image matching method using angular radial transform