Image registration is an important research topic in machine vision. A cross correlation algorithm based on Zernike moments is developed to address the image registration problem with an arbitrary rotation angle. According to the symmetric and anti-symmetric properties of trigonometric functions, a fast approach is proposed to compute the Zernike moments, which gains the moments merely by calculation of 1/8 unit circle. Afterwards, the matching point is calculated by the correlations of multiple moments. Thereby, the sub-pixel matching position is achieved by Least Square Estimations (LSE). Meanwhile, the rotation angle is estimated by synthesizing the Zernike moments phase information. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed algorithm substantially improves the matching efficiency for a prescribed matching accuracy.