Smooth texture details are easily lost in the process of image texture enhancement. Although fractional-order differential enhancement can preserve the texture details of smooth regions nonlinearly, it is sensitive to frequency resolution. Focusing on this problem, a fractional differential texture enhancement algorithm based on wavelet transform was proposed and applied to texture enhancement of liver tumor regions in plain Computed Tomography (CT) images. Firstly, wavelet transform was used to decompose the image region of interest into multiple subband components. Then, a fractional differential mask with compensation parameter was constructed based on fractional-order differential definition. Finally, the mask was used to convolve with each high frequency subband component respectively, and the image region of interest was recombined by using reverse wavelet transform. The experimental results show that the algorithm effectively preserves the low-frequency smooth texture details while observably enhances the high-frequency contour information of the tumor region by a relatively large fractional order:compared with the original region, the enhanced hepatocellular carcinoma region has the information entropy increased by 36.56% averagely, the average gradient increased by 321.56% averagely, and the mean absolute difference of 9.287 averagely; compared with the original region, the enhanced hepatic hemangioma region has the information entropy increased by 48.77% averagely, the average gradient increased by 511.26% averagely, and the mean absolute difference of 14.097 averagely.