In this paper. we propose a digital watermarking method for still images in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. The adaptive watermark insertion method in the high frequency region within a given image is employed to increase the invisibility of the inserted watermark in images, in which variable block-size method is used for selection of the high frequency region. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking method is robust to several common image processing techniques. including joint photographic experts group (JPEG) compression, lowpass filtering, multiple watermarking, and croppIng.