Efficient hardware implementation of image watermarking using DWT and AES algorithm

The paper aims at presenting an efficient way of transmission and reception of critical data that may be of prime importance to an organisation. As the demand for an unassailable communication system increases, this paper propounds a novel secure communication system which employs a method for data security by combining Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) watermarking and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) technique. The amalgamation of these techniques provides a robust communication system with enhanced security. Now, for secure image communication, Discrete Wavelet Transform is first applied for image decomposition, quantisation and determination of appropriate sub bands to precede encryption and also to decrease the execution time. After the implementation of DWT, analysis of the Advanced Encryption Standard is done and a cipher key is added to AES to improve the encryption performance. In this paper the AES-DWT system prototype is implemented using Xilinx tools on virtex 6 FPGA with XC6VCX75T package.