Copyright protection and integrity of digital images have become one of the vital issues in crucial watermark applications like Cheque Truncation System (CTS), Patient record management system and e-document verification etc. This paper illustrates an integrated watermarking and encryption technique to safeguard copyright of images and to offer security to the watermarked image contents. Watermarking technique based on combination of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is proposed in this work. 25 sets of watermark are classified for embedding owner details with a size variation of 256—3328 bits. Watermark sequence and the secret keys are the prime requisite in the semi-blind approach for the extraction purpose. Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural similarity index measure (SSIM), Correlation Coefficient (CC), Net Pixel Change Rate (NPCR) and Entropy are specified in the objective function to identify noise, structural match, association, variation and imperceptibility factors. The experimental results display that the projected watermarking scheme offers better quantitative parameter outcomes in comparison with previous related techniques.