In this paper, we present a novel image representation approach for classifying emphysema in computed tomography (CT) images of the lung. Our proposed method extends rotation invariant uniform local binary pattern (RIULBP) and local ternary pattern (LTP), which are extensively used in a variety of computer vision applications, into rotation invariant uniform local ternary pattern (RIULTP) with a human perception principle: Weber’s law. In addition, by integrating the upper pattern and the lower pattern of the Weber-based RIULTP (WRIULTP), we further put forward the joint Weber-based rotation invariant uniform local ternary pattern (JWRIULTP), which allows for a much richer representation and also takes the comprehensive information of the image into account. The proposed methods are tested on the Outex database (texture database) and the Bruijne and Sørensen database (emphysema database). The results show the superiority of the proposed approaches to the state-of-the-art techniques for emphysema classification including rotation invariant local binary pattern (RILBP) and texton-based approach.