This paper proposes texture descriptor for texture classification called Local Neighbor Differences (LND). LND is a high discriminating texture descriptor and also robust to illumination changes. The proposed descriptor utilizes the sign of differences between surrounding pixels in a local neighborhood. The differences of those pixels are thresholded to form an 8-bit binary codeword. The decimal values of these 8-bit code words are computed and they are called LND values. A histogram of the resulting LND values is created and used as feature to describe the texture information of an image. Experimental results, with respect to texture classification accuracies using OUTEX_TC_00001 test suite has been performed. The results show that LND outperforms LBP method, with average classification accuracies of 92.3% whereas that of local binary patterns (LBP) is 90.7%.