Based on the novel definition of texture direction of a local region and direction local binary pattern(dLBP),an improved direction local binary pattern(idLBP) is proposed in this paper.Not only the grey-value changes but also the grey-value variance changes of the central pixel and its center-symmetric pixels in a local region are considered together in the new descriptor.In order to prove the performance of the presented descriptor,the methods mentioned in the paper,the traditional local binary pattern(LBP),dLBP and idLBP are tested on four different databases,and the results show that the idLBP gives the best retrieval performance in the three operators.