These days, researchers have used many techniques in e-multimedia data for intellectual property protection. One of these important techniques is watermarking which is superior to Digital Signature because it does not rise overhead and it can prevent unauthorized users from misusing digital information. However, the number of attacks with aim of distorting watermark signal or disturbing watermarks detecting are exploding. Consequently, the watermark techniques have became more complicated, but still they are not fully robust against some geometric distortions. To overcome this issue and to be enough robust against the malicious attacks, and provide a high level of imperceptibility,the watermark schemes have discovered and developed the advantages by means of Singular-value decomposition. Therefore, in recent decades there has been a significant increasing in using of SVD domain in many new image watermarking schemes, which show high robustness and imperceptibility. This discussion of SVD in image watermarking schemes included: a concise overview on watermarking systems, a brief review on SVD properties in image processing and its weaknesses, the concept of SVD components, the main classification of different SVD based image-watermarking schemes; a brief summary of various secure SVD-based watermarking techniques and all major SVD coefficients modifying strategies are presented. In addition, potential issues and some existing solutions and guidelines are provided. Furthermore, the performance comparisons of the discussed techniques are presented in tabular format. This article contribution provides essential and potential information for the researchers to design, develop and implement efficient robust and hybrid SVD-based image watermarking systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]