The invention discloses a high performance digital watermarking method based on Hessenberg decomposition and aims to change the present situation that binary or gray scale images are usually used for thedigital watermarking, and the requirement that colorful digital images are used for the digital watermarking are met. According to the technical points, firstly dimension reduction is carried out on a colorful host image and the colorful host image is divided into 4*4 image blocks; secondly, matrix Hessenberg decomposition is carried out on each image block, the magnitude relations between the second row, the second column and the third row, the second column of the orthogonal matrix are finely adjusted, and colorful digital image watermarking is embedded into the colorful host image; and when the watermarking is extracted, only the host image containing the watermarking is needed without the help of the original watermarking or original host image, and the purpose of blind extraction is achieved. The method has the advantages that the watermarking invisibility is relatively good, the robustness is relatively high, the execution effect is relatively high, and the method is suitable for copyright protection that the colorful digital images are used as the digital watermarking.