Polar Separable Transform for Efficient Orthogonal Rotation-Invariant Image Representation

Orthogonal moment-based image representations are fundamental in computer vision, but classical methods suffer from high computational complexity and numerical instability at large orders. Zernike and pseudo-Zernike moments, for instance, require coupled radial-angular processing that precludes efficient factorization, resulting in O(n3N2) to O(n6N2) complexity and O(N4) condition number scaling for the nth-order moments on an N× N image. We introduce PSepT (Polar Separable Transform), a separable orthogonal transform that overcomes the non-separability barrier in polar coordinates. PSepT achieves complete kernel factorization via tensor-product construction of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) radial bases and Fourier harmonic angular bases, enabling independent radial and angular processing. This separable design reduces computational complexity to O(N2 log N), memory requirements to O(N2), and condition number scaling to O(√N), representing exponential improvements over polynomial approaches. PSepT exhibits orthogonality, completeness, energy conservation, and rotation-covariance properties. Experimental results demonstrate better numerical stability, computational efficiency, and competitive classification performance on structured datasets, while preserving exact reconstruction. The separable framework enables high-order moment analysis previously infeasible with classical methods, opening new possibilities for robust image analysis applications.