Local feature detection and description have gained a lot ofinterest in recent years since photometric descriptors computed for interest regions have proven to be very successful in many applications. In this paper, we propose a novel interest region descriptor which combines the strengths of the well-known SIFT descriptor and the LBP texture operator. It is called the center-symmetric local binary pattern (CS-LBP) descriptor. This new descriptor has several advantages such as tolerance to illumination changes, robustness on flat image areas, and computational efficiency. We evaluate our descriptor using a recently presented test protocol. Experimental results show that the CS-LBP descriptor outperforms the SIFT descriptor for most of the test cases, especially for images with severe illumination variations.