Abstract: In view of the current terrain matching algorithm based on 3D Zernike moment, which is computationally heavy and has poor real-time performance, this paper proposes a fast calculation method of 3D Zernike moment for terrain matching and a matching method that only uses odd-order descriptors to form feature vectors. The forming of method is based on the analysis of the computational process of 3D Zernike moments and the performance of odd-order descriptors. The simulation results show that the fast algorithm proposed in this paper can not only significantly reduce the amount of computation, but also improve the matching accuracy.