It is well known that the sensitivity to translations and orientations is a major drawback in 2D discrete wavelet transform (DWT). In this paper, we have proposed an effective scheme for rotation invariant adaptive wavelet packet transform. During decomposition, the wavelet coefficients are obtained by applying a polar transform (PT) followed by a row-shift invariant wavelet packet decomposition (RSIWPD). In the first stage, the polar transform generates a row-shifted image and is adaptive to the image size to achieve complete and minimum sampling rate. In the second stage, the RSIWPD is applied to the row-shifted image to generate rotation invariant but over completed subbands of wavelet coefficients. In order to reduce the redundancy and computational complexity, we adaptively select some subbands to decompose and form a best basis representation with minimal information cost with respect to an appropriate information cost function. With this best basis representation, the original image can be reconstructed easily by applying a row-shift invariant wavelet packet reconstruction (RSIWPR) followed by an inverse polar transform (IPT). In the experiments, we study the application of this representation for texture classification and achieve 96.5% classification accuracy.