Automated characterization of different vessel wall tissues including atherosclerotic plaques, branchings and stents from intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) gray-scale images was addressed. The texture features of each frame were firstly detected with local binary pattern (LBP), Haar-like and Gabor filter in the present study. Then, a Gentle Adaboost classifier was designed to classify tissue features. The methods were validated with clinically acquired image data. The manual characterization results obtained by experienced physicians were adopted as the golden standard to evaluate the accuracy. Results indicated that the recognition accuracy of lipidic plaques reached 94.54%, while classification precision of fibrous and calcified plaques reached 93.08%. High recognition accuracy can be reached up to branchings 93.20% and stents 93.50%, respectively.