High quality of recovered image need much more information input as watermark. However, if we want guarantee a certain level of invisibility of watermark and its robustness to some normal image processing, the capacity of watermark is limited. It’s hard to balance each other to get a good performance. This paper reports a systematic approach for benchmarking semi-fragile watermarking algorithms for authentication and restoration. The benchmarking approach is based on a generic dataflow framework of all semi-fragile authentication-restoration watermarking systems and it defines a set of performance metrics that reflect different aspects of the overall performance. Both non-malicious manipulations and attacks are modelled by a channel simulator between the sender and the receiver. The benchmarking process can be done at two levels: system level and component level. The system level benchmarking is the one normally conducted in the literature where a number of algorithms are compared without considering their internal structures. The component level benchmarking is done by reconfiguring only one component of an existing algorithm in order to observe the influence of the component to the final performance of the whole system. Following the benchmarking approach, a software system was developed to benchmark three selected semi-fragile authentication-restoration watermarking algorithms working in DCT domain and variants of the three algorithms. The benchmarking results lead to some insights about how to further improve performance of existing algorithms.