In this paper, the shift-invariant complex directional filter bank (CDFB) is proposed for texture image retrieval. By combining the Laplacian pyramid and the CDFB, a new image representation with an overcomplete ratio of less than 8/3 is obtained. The direction subbands' coefficients are used to form a feature vector for classification. Texture retrieval performance of the proposed representation is compared to those of the conventional transforms including the Gabor wavelet, the contourlet and the steerable pyramid. The overcomplete ratio of the proposed complex directional pyramid is about twice that of the contourlet, and is much lower than those of the other two transforms. An experiment shows that the new transform outperforms the steerable pyramid and the contourlet, and is comparable to the Gabor wavelet in texture image retrieval