The accurate and efficient classification of steel surface defects is critical for ensuring product quality and minimizing production costs. This paper proposes a novel method based on wavelet transform and texture descriptors for the robust and precise classification of steel surface defects. By leveraging the multiscale analysis capabilities of wavelet transforms, our method extracts both broad and fine-grained textural features. It involves decomposing images using multi-level wavelet transforms, extracting a series set of statistical and textural features from the resulting coefficients, and employing Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) to select the most discriminative features. A comprehensive series of experiments was conducted on two datasets, NEU-CLS and X-SDD, to evaluate the proposed method. The results highlight the effectiveness of the method in accurately classifying steel surface defects, outperforming the state-of-the-art techniques. Our method achieved an accuracy of 99.67% for the NEU-CLS dataset and 98.24% for the X-SDD dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our method in scenarios with limited data, maintaining high accuracy, making it well-suited for practical industrial applications where obtaining large datasets can be challenging.