Digital watermarking has been proposed as a method of copyright protection of audio, images, video and text. We propose to use the newly introduced transform for two dimensional signals, namely, the contourlet transform for image watermarking application. We have carried out simulations with two kinds of images - maps consisting of lot of curves and texts and those with textures. The watermarked images were subjected to different attacks like mean filtering, quantization and JPEG compression. It is observed that the contourlet based algorithm outperforms wavelet and DCT based methods in this application. It is also apparent from the simulation results that contourlet based techniques give a distinct advantage over conventional techniques in images like maps which consist of lot of curves and texts