In computer vision, meaurement of image properties such as color or texture is essential. In this paper, we propose a solid framework for the local measurement of texture in color images. We give a physical basis for the integration of the well-known Gabor filters with the measurement of color. Our method implies that the color -texture is measured in the wavelength-Fourier domain. The measurement filter in this domain boils down to a 3D Gaussian, representing a Gabor-Gaussian in the spatial color domain. In addition, the extended measurements invariant to shadow or shading can be derived directly form the proposed method. We apply a simple segmentation algorithm to illustrate the performance of our proposed color-texture measurement. The derived color-texture filter is demonstrated to be accurate in capturing texture statistics. In addition, the method is compatible with the measurement of grey-value texture.(c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.