We introduce a robust image watermarking scheme for copyright protection using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). The core idea of the proposed approach is to decompose ail image into four wavelet sub-bands and then apply NMF to the blocks of each sub-band, followed by ail eigendecomposition distortion step. The experimental results clearly show a better visual imperceptibility and ail excellent resiliency of the proposed watermarking scheme against intentional and geometric attacks. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.