In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient approach for active unsurpervised texture segmentation. First, we show how we can extract a small set of good features for texture segmentation based on the structure tensor and nonlinear diffusion. Then, we propose a variational framework that incorporates these features in a level set based unsupervised segmentation that adaptively takes into account their estimated statistical information inside and outside the region to segment. The approach has been tested on various textured images, and its performance is favorably compared to recent studies.