A new statistical model for characterizing texture images base don wavelet-domain hidden Markov models and steerable pyramids is presented. The new model is shown to capture well both the subband marginal distributions and the dependencies across scales and orientations of the wavelet descriptors. Once it is trained for an input texture image, the model can be easily steered to characterize that texture at any other orientations. After a diagonalization operation, one obtains a rotation-invariant description of the texture image. The effectiveness of the new model is demonstrated in large test image databases where significant gains in retrieval performance are shown.