This paper presents a new rotation-invariant image retrieval method, which extends a recently introduced classification technique based on steerable wavelet transforms. In the proposed procedure, the feature extraction step consists of estimating the covariations (lower-order cross-correlations) between the wavelet subband coefficients, which are modeled as subGaussian random vectors. The similarity measurement is carried out first by employing norms calculating the distance between the covariation matrices representing two distinct images and second by evaluating the Kullback-Leibler Distance (KLD) between their corresponding subGaussian distributions. We provide analytical expressions relating the subGaussian features corresponding to a rotated image from the features of the original image. Finally, we relate the employed optimal lower-order correlation (p≤2) to the degree of nonGaussianity of the wavelet coefficients, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using real texture images.