A Survey on Digital Image Steganography: Current Trends and Challenges

Abstract

Steganography and Steganalysis is an information hiding technique for data protection and security from unauthorized access and use. Steganography is defined as the art and science of covert information in plain sight in various media sources such as text, images, audio, video, network channel etc. so, as to not stimulate any suspicion; while steganalysis is the science of attacking the steganographic system to reveal the secret message. Steganography is often designed as a trade-off between robustness, imperceptibility and message payload hiding capacity. The paper provides detailed review of the current trends in digital image steganography, where the secret message is embedded in image cover source and analysis of the different approaches along with the impact on the choice of embedding algorithm, image cover selection, the image performance metrics with extensive focus given on adaptive image steganography, which is currently the most secure steganographic system applicable in spatial, transform and side-informed steganography. The research contributions have been summarized, with directions to future improvement.