The work aims to design the adaptive image watermarking algorithm based on YCoCg-R color space and discrete cosine transform, in order to solve the defects like poor watermark capacity and imperceptibility in current watermarking technology of color images. Firstly, three color components (Y, Co and Cg) were calculated by transforming the carrier image from the RGB space into YCoCg-R space. Then, the corresponding DCT coefficients were obtained by introducing the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to process the Y component. The fuzzy clustering analysis was introduced to regard the DCT low frequency coefficients as local features. The DCT coefficients suitable for embedding watermarks were determined by training DCT low frequency coefficients with SVM mechanism. The watermark embedding mechanism was designed to hide the watermark data into the appropriate DCT low fre-quency coefficients. The Y component was transformed from the frequency domain to the airspace by means of reversible DCT method. The watermark image was outputted by combining the initial Co and Cg components and transforming them into RGB space. Finally, the initial watermark information was restored by the corresponding watermark extraction method. The test data showed that the proposed technology had higher imperceptibility and watermark capacity compared with the current watermarking method. The watermark image had a PSNR value of 43.67 dB, and the watermark capacity of its allowable watermark capacity could be more than 1 bits. Restoration watermark had higher quality and the correlation coefficient NC exceeded 0.92 under a variety of attacks. The proposed technology can better hide the watermark information in the carrier image, and it has higher robustness and security.