This paper describes a novel technique for texture feature extraction and classification. The proposed feature extraction technique uses an Auto- Associative Neural Network (AANN) and the classification technique uses a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) with a single hidden layer. The two approaches such as AANN-MLP and statistical-MLP were investigated. The performance of the proposed techniques was evaluated on large benchmark database of texture patterns. The results are very promising compared to other techniques. Some of the experimental results are presented in this paper. Keywords: pattern recognition, feature extraction, neural networks © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001