Abstract: In order to improve the retrieval rate of the original contourlet transform texture image retrieval system, a contourlet-1.3- transform based texture image retrieval method was proposed. Generalized Gaussian Density (GGD) model parameters were cascaded to form feature vectors and KullbackLeibler distance (KLD) function was used for similarity measure. Experimental results indicated that contourlet-1.3-transformbased image retrieval system is superior to that of the original contourlet transform under the same system structure with almost same length of feature vectors, retrieval time and memory needed. Furthermore, GGD combined with KLD method has higher retrieval rates than energy based features combined with Euclidean distance under comparable levels of computational complexity.