A new method to describe texture images using a hybrid combination of local and global texture descriptors is proposed in this paper. In this regard, a new adaptive local binary pattern (ALBP) descriptor is presented in order to carry out the local description. It is built by adding oriented standard deviation information to an ALBP descriptor in order to achieve a more complete representation of the images, and hence, it has been called adaptive local binary pattern with oriented standard deviation (ALBPS). Regarding semen vitality assessment, ALBPS outperformed previous literature works with an 81.88% accuracy and also yielded higher hit rates than the LBP and ALBP baseline methods. Concerning the global description of the images, several classical texture algorithms were tested and a descriptor based on wavelet transform and Haralick feature extraction (wavelet concurrent feature 13 (WCF13)) obtained the best results. Both local and global descriptors were combined, and the classification was carried out with a support vector machine. Two data sets have been evaluated: textures under varying illumination, pose and scale (KTH-TIPS) 2a data set and a second spermatozoa boar data set used to distinguish between dead or alive sperm heads. Therefore, our proposal is novel in three ways. First, a new local feature extraction method ALBPS is introduced. Second, a hybrid method combining the proposed local ALBPS and a global descriptor is presented, outperforming our first approach and all other methods evaluated for this problem. Third, texture classification accuracy is greatly improved with the two former texture descriptors presented. F score and accuracy values were computed in order to measure the performance. The best overall result was yielded by combining ALBPS with WCF13, reaching an F score = 0.886 and an accuracy of 85.63% in the spermatozoa data set and an 84.45% of hit rate in the KTH-TIPS 2a.