In this paper, a new approach for zero-watermarking has been proposed based on log-polar mapping, all phase biorthogonal sine transform and singular value decomposition. The core idea is to produce a zero watermark to protect the copyright of the image. For this purpose, the host image is transformed into the log-polar domain followed by the all phase biorthogonal sine transform (APBST). The transformed coefficients are then divided into nonoverlapping blocks and some blocks are selected based on secret key. These blocks are finally used to formulate a reference matrix which is utilized to generate a zero watermark for the host image. A detailed experimental analysis is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm against various image/signal processing distortions. © 2020, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.