This paper presents a new method for extract three-dimensional (3D) discrete spherical Fourier descriptors based on surface curvature voxeis for pollen particle recognition.In order to reduce the high amount of pollen information and noise disturbance,the geometric normalized curvature voxels with the principal curvedness are first extracted to represent the intrinsic pollen volumetric data.Then the curvature voxels are decomposed into radial and angular components with spherical harmonic transform in spherical coordinates.Finally the 3D discrete Fourier transform is applied to the decomposed curvature voxels to obtain the 3D spherical Fourier descriptors for pollen recognition.Experimental results show that the presented descriptors are invariant to different pollen particle geometric transformations,such as pose change and spatial rotation,and can obtain high recognition accuracy and speed simultaneously.