In this paper we present a new watermarking scheme for still image data. Most of the recent work in watermarking can be grouped into two categories: spatial domain methods and frequency domain methods. We introduce a novel approach of watermarking which involves embedding the watermark in the discrete wavelet domain. We make use of a multi resolution data fusion approach in which the image and watermark are both transformed into the discrete wavelet domain. The resulting image pyramids are then fused according to a series of combination. After watermark insertion, inverse DWT is applied to the sub-bands with modified coefficients to obtain the watermarked image. For watermark extraction, a threshold-based decoder is designed. Embedding and extraction process are characterized with parameters and genetic algorithm is used for parameter optimization. Optimization is to maximize the values of peak signal-to-noise ratio of the watermarked image and normalized cross correlation of the extracted watermark. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the existing schemes and significant improvement is observed
