Abstract. Digital watermarks have been proposed as a method for discouraging illicit copying and distribution of copyrighted material. This paper describes a method for the secure and robust copyright protection of digital images. We present an approach for embedding a digital watermark into an image using the Fourier transform. To this watermark is added a template in the Fourier transform domain to render the method robust against general linear transformations. We detail a new algorithm for the accurate and e cient recovery of the template in an image which has undergone a general a ne transformation. Furthermore we demonstrate how the template can be used as a tool for asserting the presence of a watermark. We also systematically evaluate the algorithm and present results which demonstrate the robustness of the method against some common image processing operations such as compression, rotation, scaling and aspect ratio changes.