In this paper an efficient approach via wavelet for digital watermark in DEM(digital elevation mode) data is developed, which effectly protects the copyright of DEM data and avoids the unauthoritative user. A technique based on lifting scheme is presented to construct the compactly supported wavelets whose coefficients are composed of a free variable. When t=1, the integer wavelets based on lifting scheme only use integral addition and shift, so it’s fast and easily realized via hardware. A method is presented to build the wavelet coefficient set which can embed watermark information. The bit is inserted in the high activity texture regions with the maximum strength of Just Noticeable Distortion (JND) tolerance of Human Visual System (HVS). Keeping the terrain figure and hypsography, the digital watermark is robust. A hash one-way is constructed by the Rabin method, and the digital watermark arithmetic can be public.