Abstract: A new semi-blind high-resolution remote sensing image watermarking algorithm robust to general geometric distortions is proposed.The characteristics of high-resolution remote sensing images are given full consideration.In the watermark embedding procedure,the original watermark information is firstly processed by the mechanism of spread-spectrum.Then,in order to generate the key matrix,the watermark values and the most significant bit of the image are compared.Finally,the watermark is embedded into the most significant bit or the sub-least significant bit,and the key matrix is saved as the binary format.In the watermark extraction procedure,the template matching technique is employed to extract the optimal watermark information.Experiments confirm that the watermarked image has a very good invisibility and less effect on the original image.In addition,the watermark information embedded by the proposed scheme is robust to the general geometrical attacks such as cropping,rotation,translation,noise and filter and so on.