Most of the existing local binary pattern methods discard local color differences by holding their binary information. And local spatial information is also neglected. To address these problems, a robust color image descriptor local color directional quaternionic pattern (LCDQP) is proposed. In the descriptor, the color distance map (CDM) is generated in the RGB color space to capture the color distribution among three channels. According to the distribution of CDM elements and their neighbors, four edge models are defined to describe the change trend of the original image. Then, based on this, the LCDQP strings are gained according to the distribution of four models in the four directions of 0 deg, 45 deg, 90 deg, and 135 deg. Finally, an effective quaternionic code method is adopted to construct the LCDQP descriptor. The proposed descriptor not only captures the local color features but also reflects the spatial structure information. Experiments on four representative databases demonstrate that the proposed descriptor is superior to other state-of-the-art approaches. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.