Watermarking technique is used to provide ownership and copyright protection to the digital content. In this paper, a robust watermarking technique has been proposed using 3AES. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is chosen as the domain for the robustness. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is modified to triple AES (3AES) for the better security requirement. This technique is evaluated by Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Cross-correlation (NC) values. The results suggest the robustness, imperceptibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Watermarking technique is extensively used for copyright protection and to provide ownership (Wang et al., 2008 and 2009). Since the security of the watermark is an issue in the current era, the standard cryptographic techniques are not sufficient to provide the required level of security (Riaz and Leem, 2013). Also, we are focusing on the robustness of the technique to protect the digital content from various image processing attacks (Fan and Gao, 2009).

Cryptographic standards, such as Data Encryption Standard (DES) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), can be chosen for the encryption of the watermark before the embedment. Since many attacks have been reported against these encryption standards, we have tried to enhance the security by using Triple AES algorithm. For better robustness, wavelets are chosen as the embedding domain.

Xiao et al. (2009) used the standard AES algorithm for the watermark encryption. Riaz et al. (2013) used AES algorithm for the watermark encryption before the watermarking process. Pradhan et al. (2013) have modified the standard AES algorithm using different chaotic sequence for security enhancement.

In this paper, a robust watermarking technique has been proposed using Triple AES (3AES) in wavelet domain. Since the standard DES has been improved to 3DES for the security enhancement, we have taken that idea for the modification of the standard AES.

Computer Sciences Journal, DES, 3DES, AES, 3AES, Watermarking, Encryption, Decryption, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Normalized Cross-correlation (NC).