Digital watermarks have been proposed as a method for discouraging illicit copying and distribution of copyrighted material. This paper describes a method for the secure and robust copyright protection of digital images. We present an approach for embedding a digital watermark into an image using the fast Fourier transform. To this watermark is added a template in the Fourier transform domain to render the method robust against rotations and scaling, or aspect ratio changes. We detail a new algorithm based on the log-polar or log-log maps for the accurate and efficient recovery of the template in a rotated and scaled image. We also present results which demonstrate the robustness of the method against some common image processing operations such as compression, rotation, scaling and aspect ratio changes.