The ultimate reason of low retrieval rate of contourlet transform texture image retrieval system lies in the coefficients shift sensitive characters and high oscillating in transform domain. In order to overcome the defects of contourlet transform, a mapping-based contourlet-1.3 transform was proposed, and the shift invariant character was proved. A texture image retrieval system based on the new transform was proposed in which the feature vectors are formed by cascading the energy and standard deviation of each sub-band in the transform domain, and Canberra distance was used as similarity metric. Experimental results show that the image retrieval system is superior to that of the original contourlet transform, contourlet-2.3, mapping-based contourlet transform and mapping-based contourlet-2.3 transform with the same length of feature vectors, retrieval time and memory.