In this paper, we proposed a novel watermarking scheme based on adaptive quantization index modulation and singular value decomposition in the hybrid discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT). The secret watermark bits are embedded on the singular values vector of blocks within low frequency subband in host image hybrid DWT-DCT domain. To embed watermark imperceptibly, robustly and securely, we model the adaptive quantization steps by utilizing human visual system (HVS) characteristics and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is robust to variety of image processing attacks. In the proposed algorithm the quantized embedding strategy is adopted, so no host image is needed for blind extraction of watermarking image.