A region of interest dictates the most important visible aspects of an image, so distortion within these areas will be highly noticeable to any viewer. The visual attention model computes such regions in an image. In this paper, we present wavelet domain computation of the visual attention model and its applicability in wavelet-based watermarking. The proposed algorithm can embed more information into visually uninteresting areas within the host image, determined by the visual attention model. This algorithm has increased robustness to various natural image processing and filtering attacks, while minimum effect on the image quality as verified by both subjective and objective evaluations. Such an approach can be adopted into many multimedia forensic applications to aid the watermarking process.