In this paper a new learning algorithm is proposed with the purpose of texture segmentation. The algorithm is a competitive clustering scheme with two specific features: elliptical clustering is accomplished by incorporating the Mahalanobis distance measure into the learning rules, and under-utilization of smaller clusters is avoided by incorporating a frequency-sensitive term. In the paper, an efficient learning rule that incorporates these features is elaborated.In the experimental section, several experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed technique for the segmentation of textured images. On compositions of textured images, Gabor filters were applied to generate texture features. The segmentation performance is compared to k-means clustering with and without the use of the Mahalanobis distance and to the ordinary competitive learning scheme. It is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm outperforms the others.