An example provides a system and method of robust alignment and payload recovery for data-bearing images. The method includes digitizing a printed version of a stegatone, computing the transformation parameters of the stegatone, and processing individual local regions of the stegatone to determine local transformation parameters. The method also includes performing an alignment evaluation to compute a metric value that represents the quality of a local alignment between a reference halftone and the stegatone. Further, the method includes selecting alignment parameters based on optimization of the metric value, mapping the shift of clustered-dots in each cell in comparison to the reference halftone, and recovering the payload by decoding the stegatone.