The present disclosure provides systems and methods for improved image watermarking to improve robustness and capacity, without degrading perceptibility. Specifically, the systems and methods discussed herein allow for a higher decoding success rate, at the same distortion level and message rate; or a higher message rate, at the same distortion level and decoding success rate. Implementations of these systems utilize a side chain of additional information, available only to the decoder and not the encoder, to achieve asymptotically lossless data compression, allowing the same message to be transmitted in fewer bits.