Can wavelets be used for complex texture discrimination?
I think you should just dig deeper and get your hands dirty. I have used Mathematica as it is the fastest way I can model something like this

As an example:

 

(* img *)

dwd = DiscreteWaveletTransform[img, BiorthogonalSplineWavelet[1, 3], 4]


Here's how the decomposition tree looks like



You can then extract every coefficient

coeffs = dwd[{___, 0 | 1 | 2 | 3}, {"Image", "ImageFunction" -&gt; Identity, ImageSize -&gt; 120}]


From left to right {0}, {1}, {2} and {3}.



And you can compare those to the coefficients after applying the 1 + Log[coeff^2] function to them