The exponential growth of digital media production, distribution, and online sharing has intensified the need for reliable mechanisms that ensure image and video authenticity. With the rise of advanced editing tools and deepfake technologies, safeguarding multimedia content from tampering, unauthorized replication, or malicious manipulation has become a critical research challenge. Traditional cryptographic solutions provide confidentiality but fail to maintain post-decryption integrity, whereas watermarking techniques ensure persistent ownership verification but often lack resilience against intentional attacks. To address these limitations, hybrid authentication systems combining cryptography and transform-domain watermarking have emerged as a promising direction. Among them, the integration of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) watermarking has gained significant attention for its robustness, security, and scalability. AES protects watermark data through strong encryption, while DWT enables imperceptible and resilient embedding across multiple frequency sub-bands. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of AES-DWT-based authentication frameworks for images and videos, examining watermark generation, embedding and extraction mechanisms, performance metrics, attack resistance, and computational efficiency. The paper synthesizes findings from existing research, highlights strengths and bottlenecks of current models, and discusses challenges related to real-time video authentication, geometric distortion resilience, and secure key distribution. It also identifies future research directions involving deep learning-based watermark recovery, hardware acceleration, hybrid transforms, and blockchain-enabled authentication. Overall, the AES-DWT paradigm represents a powerful and future-ready approach for securing multimedia content in cloud environments, surveillance systems, digital forensics, and copyright protection.

Keywords - AES Encryption; Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT); Image Authentication; Video Watermarking; Multimedia Security

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1. Godase MV, Mulani A, Ghodak MR, Birajadar MG, Takale MS, Kolte M. A MapReduce and Kalman filter based secure IIoT environment in Hadoop. Sanshodhak. 2024 Jun;25:38-47.
2. Mulani AO, Jadhav MM, Seth M. Painless machine learning approach to estimate blood glucose level with non-invasive devices. InArtificial intelligence, internet of things (IoT) and smart materials for energy applications 2022 Oct 12 (pp. 83-100). CRC Press.
3. Maske Y, Jagadale AB, Mulani AO, Pise AC. Development of BIOBOT system to assist COVID patient and caretakers. European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine. 2023;10(01):2023.
4. Takale S, Mulani DA. Video Watermarking System. International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET). 2022;10.
5. Thangavel KD, Palaniappan S. Low power sleepy keeper technique based VLSI architecture of Viterbi decoder in WLANs. Australian Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. 2020 Oct 1;17(4):263-8.
6. Kumar A. A review on implementation of digital image watermarking techniques using LSB and DWT. Information and Communication Technology for Sustainable Development: Proceedings of ICT4SD 2018. 2019 Jun 26:595- 602.
7. Benoraira A, Benmahammed K, Boucenna N. Blind image watermarking technique based on differential embedding in DWT and DCT domains. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. 2015 Jul 3;2015(1):55.
8. Arora SM. A DWT-SVD based robust digital watermarking for digital images. Procedia computer science. 2018 Jan 1;132:1441-8.
9. Ali M, Ahn CW. An optimized watermarking technique based on self-adaptive DE in DWT–SVD transform domain. Signal processing. 2014 Jan 1;94:545-56.
10. Abdulrahman AK, Ozturk S. A novel hybrid DCT and DWT based robust watermarking algorithm for color images. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 2019 Jun 30;78(12):17027-49.
11. Kahlessenane F, Khaldi A, Kafi R, Euschi S. A DWT based watermarking approach for medical image protection. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. 2021 Feb;12(2):2931-8.

The exponential growth of digital media production, distribution, and online sharing has intensified the need for reliable mechanisms that ensure image and video authenticity. With the rise of advanced editing tools and deepfake technologies, safeguarding multimedia content from tampering, unauthorized replication, or malicious manipulation has become a critical research challenge. Traditional cryptographic solutions provide confidentiality but fail to maintain post-decryption integrity, whereas watermarking techniques ensure persistent ownership verification but often lack resilience against intentional attacks. To address these limitations, hybrid authentication systems combining cryptography and transform-domain watermarking have emerged as a promising direction. Among them, the integration of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) watermarking has gained significant attention for its robustness, security, and scalability. AES protects watermark data through strong encryption, while DWT enables imperceptible and resilient embedding across multiple frequency sub-bands. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of AES-DWT-based authentication frameworks for images and videos, examining watermark generation, embedding and extraction mechanisms, performance metrics, attack resistance, and computational efficiency. The paper synthesizes findings from existing research, highlights strengths and bottlenecks of current models, and discusses challenges related to real-time video authentication, geometric distortion resilience, and secure key distribution. It also identifies future research directions involving deep learning-based watermark recovery, hardware acceleration, hybrid transforms, and blockchain-enabled authentication. Overall, the AES-DWT paradigm represents a powerful and future-ready approach for securing multimedia content in cloud environments, surveillance systems, digital forensics, and copyright protection.

Keywords - AES Encryption; Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT); Image Authentication; Video Watermarking; Multimedia Security

🔒 This is a subscription article

Full text is available to subscribers and institutional members. Please choose an option below to access it.

1. Godase MV, Mulani A, Ghodak MR, Birajadar MG, Takale MS, Kolte M. A MapReduce and Kalman filter based secure IIoT environment in Hadoop. Sanshodhak. 2024 Jun;25:38-47.
2. Mulani AO, Jadhav MM, Seth M. Painless machine learning approach to estimate blood glucose level with non-invasive devices. InArtificial intelligence, internet of things (IoT) and smart materials for energy applications 2022 Oct 12 (pp. 83-100). CRC Press.
3. Maske Y, Jagadale AB, Mulani AO, Pise AC. Development of BIOBOT system to assist COVID patient and caretakers. European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine. 2023;10(01):2023.
4. Takale S, Mulani DA. Video Watermarking System. International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET). 2022;10.
5. Thangavel KD, Palaniappan S. Low power sleepy keeper technique based VLSI architecture of Viterbi decoder in WLANs. Australian Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. 2020 Oct 1;17(4):263-8.
6. Kumar A. A review on implementation of digital image watermarking techniques using LSB and DWT. Information and Communication Technology for Sustainable Development: Proceedings of ICT4SD 2018. 2019 Jun 26:595- 602.
7. Benoraira A, Benmahammed K, Boucenna N. Blind image watermarking technique based on differential embedding in DWT and DCT domains. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. 2015 Jul 3;2015(1):55.
8. Arora SM. A DWT-SVD based robust digital watermarking for digital images. Procedia computer science. 2018 Jan 1;132:1441-8.
9. Ali M, Ahn CW. An optimized watermarking technique based on self-adaptive DE in DWT–SVD transform domain. Signal processing. 2014 Jan 1;94:545-56.
10. Abdulrahman AK, Ozturk S. A novel hybrid DCT and DWT based robust watermarking algorithm for color images. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 2019 Jun 30;78(12):17027-49.
11. Kahlessenane F, Khaldi A, Kafi R, Euschi S. A DWT based watermarking approach for medical image protection. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing. 2021 Feb;12(2):2931-8.