Inthis paper we concentrate on robust image watermarking (i.e. capableof resisting common signal processing operations and intentional attacks todestroy the watermark) based on image features. Kutter et al.7motivated that well chosen image features survive admissible image distortionsand hence can benefit the watermarking process. These image featuresare used as location references for the region in whichthe watermark is embedded. To realize the latter, we makeuse of previous work16 where a ring-shaped region, centered aroundan image feature is determined for watermark embedding. We proposeto choose a specific sequence of image features according tostrict criteria so that the image features have large distanceto other chosen image features so that the ring shapedembedding regions do not overlap. Nevertheless, such a setup remainsprone to insertion, deletion and substitution errors. Therefore we applieda two-step coding scheme similar to the one employed byCoumou and Sharma4 for speech watermarking. Our contribution here liesin extending Coumou and Sharma's one dimensional scheme to thetwo dimensional setup that is associated with our watermarking technique.The two-step coding scheme concatenates an outer Reed-Solomon error-correction codewith an inner, blind, synchronization mechanism. {\textcopyright}2010 COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.