In this paper a watermarking technique has been proposed. The proposed watermarking technique has been incorporated in the JPEG compression standard. Unlike conventional watermarking techniques which are generally based on manipulation of the AC component in DCT domain, the proposed approach utilizes the DC component that is perceptually significant part, to embed the watermark. The watermark embedding is done using a bitplane approach. The proposed scheme does not require original image for the extraction of watermark thus making it a blind watermarking scheme. The results have shown that the proposed watermarking technique is imperceptible and secure. The proposed scheme is also compared with the QIM based watermarking scheme 10, and it is shown that the proposed scheme is simple in implementation and suitable for the authentication and tamper detection. Moreover, a detailed study has been done to choose the suitable DC component bitplane to embed the watermark. © 2010 IEEE.