Digital watermarking technique has been presented and widely researched to solve some important issues in the digital world, such as copyright protection, copy protection and content authentication. Several robust watermarking schemes based on vector quantization (VQ) have been presented. In this paper, we present a new digital image watermarking method based on SOFM vector quantizer for color images. This method utilizes the codebook partition technique in which the watermark bit is embedded into the selected VQ encoded block. The main feature of this scheme is that the watermark exists both in VQ compressed image and in the reconstructed image. The watermark extraction can be performed without the original image. The watermark is hidden inside the compressed image, so much transmission time and storage space can be saved when the compressed data are transmitted over the Internet. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method has robustness against various image processing operations without sacrificing compression performance and the computational speed.