We use a multilevel dominant eigenvector estimation algorithm to develop a new run-length texture feature extraction algorithm that preserves much of the texture information in run-length matrices and significantly improves image classification accuracy over traditional run-length techniques. The advantage of this approach is demonstrated experimentally by the classification of two texture data sets. Comparisons with other methods demonstrate that the run-length matrices contain great discriminatory information and that a good method of extracting such information is of paramount importance to successful classification.