Vibration mode shape description of an aero-engine casing structure using Zernike moment descriptor (ZMD) was introduced in this paper. The mode shapes of the aero-engine casing structure can be decomposed as a linear combination of a series of Zernike polynomials

with the feature of each Zernike polynomial reflecting a part of characteristic of mode shapes

based on Zernike moment transformation. Meanwhile

the reconstruction of mode shapes with ZMD was explored and its ability to filtering the noise contaminated in the mode shapes was studied. Simulation of the aero-engine casing structure indicated the advantage of this method to depict the mode shapes of a symmetric structure. Results demonstrate that the Zernike moment description of the mode shapes can effectively describe the double modes in the symmetric structure and also has the ability to remove or significantly reduce the influence of noise in the mode shapes. Such feature shows great practical value for further research on the correlation

model updating and model validation of the symmetric structure's finite element model.