The work aims to put forward the progressive watermarking algorithm of scalable image based on DWT-SVD, which can be used to protect the copyright of the scalable image and has great signification for security technology of the scalable image. A three-level wavelet of carrier images was decomposed to ensure the energy concentration, thus reducing the impact of attacks on watermark information. The H×H non-repetitive blocking of sub-bands decomposed by each wavelet was conducted. The singular value of each sub block was decomposed. Then the first singular value was calculated to help select the proper embedding strength. Through comprehensive consideration, the embedding strength of the algorithm was 5. Finally, according to the descending order of importance, the eight bit-plane decomposition of the gray scale watermark image was done to embed it into the three-level wavelet decomposition of carrier image and into the resolution ratio sub-band after quantization. Compression ratio decreased from 90 to 20. With the decrease of compression ratio, the bit plane extracted from gray watermark image was increased, thus image quality was improved and NC value was increased gradually. When the compression ratio was below 70, it would have no influence on the lowest frequency sub-band coefficient. When the compression ratio was increased to above 80, it would have cer-tain effect on the lowest frequency sub-band information, but the watermark image could still be extracted. After different attacks and regular signal processing attacks, watermark information could be extracted from resolution ratios at different levels, while the watermark quality would become better with the resolution ratio increased. The progressive extraction and robustness simulation experiment indicate that this arithmetic can well resist the compression attack and shear attack and it also has better robustness of regular signal processing.