Digital watermarking has become a promising technique for ensuring copyright protection and content authentication in multimedia applications. In image watermarking, the key challenge lies in achieving a balance between robustness and imperceptibility. This paper introduces a Hybrid Semi-Blind and Pseudo Zero-Watermarking Scheme Using QRSVD in the DWT Domain, designed to enhance watermark robustness while reducing false-positive detections during extraction. The proposed framework integrates QR decomposition and SVD within the DWT domain, adopting an improved linear-mixing embedding strategy applied to the LL sub-band. The watermark is embedded in the luminance (Y) component of the YCbCr color space to preserve perceptual quality while improving resistance to common distortions. Experimental evaluations on nine color images ( \(512 \times 512\) ) under twelve typical attacks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high imperceptibility (average PSNR of 38.5 dB and SSIM of 0.99) and strong robustness (NC \(\approx \) 1.0) with an optimal embedding strength of \(\alpha \) = 0.1. Furthermore, false-positive testing reveals no detections across 500 random images (empirical 95% upper bound \(\approx \) 0.6%) and a minimal rate of 6.25% on 240 natural images. The results confirm that the proposed hybrid approach provides an efficient and secure solution for copyright protection of digital images.