A novel adaptive visible/invisible watermarking scheme for digital images in wavelet domain is proposed in this paper. In this proposed scheme, the scaling factor is calculated adaptively through the parameters obtained from the most prominent region of cover images in wavelet domain. The most prominent region of an image is identified through speeded up robust feature (SURF) technique. The bipolar sigmoid function is used as model to calculate scaling parameter. The value of scaling parameter is adjusted through control parameter which plays a vital role in making the proposed watermarking scheme as either visible or invisible. The proposed methodology is used for preserving ownership rights and it prevents the piracy of digital data which are considered to be the basic needs of security mechanism. As proposed watermarking scheme is carried out in wavelet transform domain it is more robust to image/signal processing attacks. The experimental results and its performance analysis confirm the efficiency of the proposed watermarking scheme. Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.