This paper is concerned with the estimation of the dominant orientation of textured patches that appear in a number of images (remote sensing, biology or natural sciences for instance). It is based on the maximization of a criterion that deals with the coefficients enclosed in the different bands of a wavelet decomposition of the original image. More precisely, we search for the orientation that best concentrates the energy of the coefficients in a single direction. To compare the wavelet coefficients between the different bands, we use the Kullback–Leibler divergence on their distribution, this latter being assumed to behave like a Generalized Gaussian Density. The space–time localization of the wavelet transform allows to deal with any polygon that may be contained in a single image. This is of key importance when one works with (non-rectangular) segmented objects. We have applied the same methodology but using other criteria to compare the distributions, in order to highlight the benefit of the Kullback–Leibler divergence. In addition, the methodology is validated on synthetic and real situations and compared with a state-of-the-art approach devoted to orientation estimation.