The texture feature tensor established from a subband time–frequency image (TFI) was extracted and used to identify the fault states of a rolling bearing. The TFI of adaptive optimal-kernel distribution was optimally partitioned into TFI blocks based on the minimum frequency band entropy. The texture features were extracted from the co-occurrence matrix of each TFI block. Based on the order of the segmented frequency bands, the texture feature tensor was constructed using the multidimensional feature vectors from all the blocks; this preserved the inherent characteristic of the TFI structure and avoided the information loss caused by vectorizing multidimensional features. The linear support higher order tensor machine based on the feature tensor was applied to identify the fault states of the rolling bearing.