The classical radial harmonic Fourier moments (RHFMs) and the quaternion radial harmonic Fourier moments (QRHFMs) are gray-scale and color image descriptors. The radial harmonic functions with integer orders are not able to extract fine features from the input images. In this paper, the authors derived novel fractional-order radial harmonic functions in polar coordinates. The obtained functions are used to defined novel multi-channel fractional-order radial harmonic moments (FrMRHFMs) for color image description and analysis. The invariants to geometric transformations for these new moments are derived. A theoretical comparison between FrMRHFMs and QRHFMs is performed from the aspects of kernel function and the spectrum analysis. Numerical simulation is carried out to test these new moments in terms of image reconstruction capabilities, invariance to the similarity transformations, color image recognition and the CPU computational times. The obtained theoretical and numerical results clearly show that the proposed FrMRHFMs is superior to the QRHFMs and the existing fractional-order orthogonal moments