This paper presents a texture descriptor for color texture classification specially designed to be robust against changes in the illumination conditions. The descriptor combines a histogram of local binary patterns (LBPs) with a novel feature measuring the distribution of local color contrast. The proposed descriptor is invariant with respect to rotations and translations of the image plane and with respect to several transformations in the color space. We evaluated the proposed descriptor on the Outex test suite, by measuring the classification accuracy in the case in which training and test images have been acquired under different illuminants. The results obtained show that our descriptor outperforms the original LBP approach and its color variants, even when these are computed after color normalization. Moreover, it also outperforms several other color texture descriptors in the state of the art.