In recent years, discrete orthogonal moments have attracted the attention of the scientific community because they are a suitable tool for feature extraction. However, the numerical instability that arises because of the computation of high-order moments is the main drawback that limits their wider application. In this article, we propose an image classification method that avoids numerical errors based on discrete Shmaliy moments, which are a new family of moments derived from Shmaliy polynomials. Shmaliy polynomials have two important characteristics: one-parameter definition that implies a simpler definition than popular polynomial bases such as Krawtchouk, Hahn, and Racah; a linear weight function that eases the computation of the polynomial coefficients. We use IICBU-2008 database to validate our proposal and include Tchebichef and Krawtchouk moments for comparison purposes. The experiments are carried out through 5-fold cross-validation, and the results are computed using random forest, support vector machines, naïve Bayes, and k-nearest neighbors classifiers.