To resolve the completeness and independence of an invariant set derived by the traditional method, a systematic method for deriving a complete set of pseudo-Zernike moment similarity (translation, scale and rotation) invariants is described. First, the relationship between pseudo-Zernike moments of the original image and those of the image having the same shape but distinct orientation and scale is established. Based on this relationship, a complete set of similarity invariants can be expressed as a linear combination of the original pseudo-Zernike moments of the same order and lower order. The problem of image reconstruction from a finite set of the pseudo-Zernike moment invariants (PZMIs) is also investigated. Experimental results show that the proposed PZMIs have better performance than complex moment invariants.