Kaarna et al. [J. Imaging Sci. Technol. 48, 183–193 (2004)] presented a technique based on principal component analysis (PCA) to embed a digital watermark containing copyright information into a spectral image. In this paper, a hybrid watermarking method based on the pure PCA approach of Kaarna <etal/> and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with a pure PCA based technique against attacks including lossy image compression, median, and mean filtering. The experiments show that the proposed method outperforms a pure PCA based technique.