One of main issues in watermarking is to resolve the strength of watermark for solving the problem of trade-off between fidelity and robustness of watermarking. In the previous research, the strength of watermark has been resolved fixed value generally without considering local image characteristics such as image brightness, contrast, and edge. This paper proposes a new model to predict the strength of watermark considering local image characteristics such as image brightness, contrast, and edge for digital wavelet transform(DWT)-based image watermarking. For the study, psychological experiment was fulfilled to measure the human image perception and regression analysis showed the proposed model was statistically significant at the level of ${alpha};=;0.01$. Also the model is practically validated on fidelity and robustness of watermarking.