This paper presents an effective local image feature region descriptor, called CLDTP descriptor (Compact Local Directional Texture Pattern), and its application in image matching and object recognition. The CLDTP descriptor encodes the directional and contrast information in a local region, so it contains the gradient orientation information and the gradient magnitude information. As the dimension of the CLDTP histogram is much lower than the dimension of the LDTP histogram, the CLDTP descriptor has higher computational efficiency and it is suitable for image matching. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of the designed CLDTP descriptor.