Abstract Digital watermarking techniques have been proposed as a solution to the problem of copyright protection of multimedia data. In this paper, we propose a novel Chinese remainder theorem (CRT)-based technique for digital watermarking. The use of CRT for this purpose provides additional security along with resistance to some familiar attacks. We have shown that this technique is quite resilient to addition of the noise. We have compared performance of the proposed technique with recently reported two singular value decomposition (SVD)-based watermarking techniques and shown its superior performance in terms of tampering assessment function (TAF), computational efficiency and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). For example, the embedding time of the proposed CRT-based scheme is 6 and 3 times faster than the SVD-based Schemes 1 and 2, respectively. This technique can also be applied to document, audio and video contents.