Abstract: Most existing visible watermarking techniques only considering the host image characteristics and the visible watermark has low contrast. To achieve optimal balance between the visual quality and the visible watermark contrast, an image adaptive visible watermarking scheme in spatial domain is proposed by considering human visual system characteristics. Firstly, the scaling factor and the embedding factor for watermark insertion are calculated by combining both the host image features and the watermark image features (such as luminance and texture sensitivity). Secondly, the visible watermark is embedded into the host image by adjusting adaptively the scaling factor and the embedding factor. The visible watermark is adaptive to the host image due to the use of visual perception features. Extensive experimental results show that the watermarked image has good perceptible quality and high robustness against attempts of removal and the visible watermark has high contrast to the host image. On the average, the proposed scheme achieves at least 2.1 higher PSNR values than existing approaches.