This paper addresses a feature-based robust watermarking scheme for digital images using a local invariant features of SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Feature) descriptor. In general, the feature invariance is exploited to achieve robustness in watermarking schemes, but the leakage of information about hidden watermarks from publicly known locations and sizes of features are not considered carefully in security perspective. We propose embedding and detection methods where the watermark is bound with

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... cular areas and inserted into extracted circular feature regions. These methods enhance the robustness since the circular watermark is inserted into the selected non-overlapping feature regions instead of entire image contents. The evaluation results for repeatability measures of SURF descriptor and robustness measures present the proposed scheme can tolerate various attacks, including signal processing and geometric distortions.