AbstractThe exponential growth in electronic data over internet have increased the demand of a robust and high quality watermarking method for authentication and copyright protection. In general, the existing digital image watermarking methods embed the binary or gray scale watermark into the host image although most multimedia images are available in color. Moreover, available digital image watermarking methods generally use the correlated color spaces which impose the limitations to researchers for using only one color component at a time for embedding the watermark. Therefore, in this paper, a novel discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based color image watermarking method has been proposed which embeds the color watermark into host image using uncorrelated color space (UCS) and artificial bee colony (ABC) method. The results show that proposed method outperforms other existing methods against the various signal processing attacks.