A novel robust image watermarking scheme is presented to embed a high capacity watermark into the feature point based characteristic regions. The watermark embedding positions are first determined by the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) based local circular regions. Then the binary watermark image is embedded by quantization in the Non-subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) domain. In order to achieve rotation invariance, the watermark is embedded adaptively to the orientation of the region. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve high invisibility and it can efficiently resist traditional signal processing attacks and geometric attacks.