Comprehensive Survey of Image Steganography: Techniques, Evaluations, and Trends in Future Research

The protection of confidential information transmitted over the Internet and restricting access to specific classified data have become a major security and privacy issue. To conceal the existence of such data, digital image steganography is employed hiding the secret in questions within a cover image, arriving at a new image that is virtually indistinguishable from the original. Thus, concealed data within the cover image is prevented from being detected via unauthorized access. In light of the above, certain aspects, such as the capacity of the cover image and the imperceptibility, need to be analyzed and addressed as they constitute the crucial assessment parameters for the performance of the steganography algorithms. In this paper, we compare the steganography algorithms of least significant bit and discrete wavelet transform in terms of efficiency and capacity of concealing multiple images within a single cover image. We cover the mechanism of the embedding and extraction algorithms for multiple numbers of images to come up with knowledgeable remarks. Furthermore, performance of these stego-algorithms has been evaluated with regard to the capacity of the cover image, imperceptibility of the data, and security.

Efficient Implementation of Multi-image Secret Hiding Based on LSB and DWT Steganography Comparisons

Abstract Steganography is the science and art of covert communication. Conversely, steganalysis is the study of uncovering the steganographic process. The evolution of steganography has been paralleled by the development of steganalysis. In this game of hide and seek, the two player’s steganography and steganalysis always want to break the other down. Over the past three decades, research has produced a plethora of remarkable image steganography techniques (ISTs). The major challenge for most of these ISTs is to achieve a fair balance between the metrics such as high hiding capacity (HC), better imperceptibility, and improved security. This study aims to present an exhaustive scrutiny of various ISTs from the classical to recent developments in the spatial domain, with respect to various image steganographic metrics. Further, the current status, recent developments, open challenges, and promising directions in this field are also highlighted.

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Digital image steganography and steganalysis: A journey of the past three decades

Steganography and steganalysis is a relatively new-fangled scientific discipline in security systems and digital forensics, respectively, but one that has matured greatly over the past two decades. In any specialism of human endeavour, it is imperative to periodically pause and review the state of the discipline for what has been achieved till date. This article scrutinizes where the discipline of steganography and steganalysis at this point in time in context to the common user and new researchers in terms of current trends. Also, what has been accomplished in order to critically examine what has been done well and what ought to be done better. The state-of-the-art techniques for steganography and steganalysis (image and video) have been deliberated for the last 5 years literature. Further, the paper also takes stock the dataset and tools available for multimedia steganography and steganalysis with the examples where steganography has been used in real-life. It is a corpus of the author’s opinion and the viewpoints of different other researchers and practitioners, working in this discipline. Additionally, experiments were done using image steganography techniques to analyse the recent trends. This survey is intended to provide a complete guide for common people and new researchers and scholars approaching this field, sight on the existing and the future of steganography and steganalysis.

Steganography and Steganalysis (in digital forensics): a Cybersecurity guide

The amount of data exchanged via the Internet is increasing nowadays. Hence, data security is termed as a serious issue while communication of data is processed over the Internet. Everyone needs th...

Analysis of various data security techniques of steganography: A survey

Steganography is a data-concealing technique that provides a covert communication. This paper proposes a spatial domain color steganography method that uses a neighboring pixel-pair differencing co...

An adaptive color image steganography method using adjacent pixel value differencing and LSB substitution technique

\n Steganography is a data hiding technique, which is used for securing data. Both spatial and transform domains are used to implement a steganography method. In this paper, a novel transform domain method is proposed to provide a better data hiding method. The method uses a multi-resolution transform function, integer wavelet transform (IWT) that decomposes an image into four subbands: low-low, low-high, high-low and high-high subband. The proposed method utilizes only the three subbands keeping the low-low subband untouched which helps to improve the quality of the stego image. The method applies a coefficient value differencing approach to determine the number of secret bits to be embedded in the coefficients. The method shows a good performance in terms of embedding capacity, imperceptibility and robustness. A number of metrics are computed to show the quality of the stego image. It can also withstand RS steganalysis, Chi-squared test and Subtractive Pixel Adjacency Matrix steganalysis successfully. The deformation of the histogram and Pixel Difference Histogram for different embedding percentages are also demonstrated, which show a significant similarity with the original cover image. The proposed method shows an achievement of 2.3bpp embedding capacity with a good quality of stego image.

A New Steganography Method Using Integer Wavelet Transform and Least Significant Bit Substitution

This paper presents a novel steganographic method based on Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution and 8-neighboring Pixel Value Differencing (8nPVD) for gray scale image in order to improve the embedding capacity with an imperceptible stego image. The proposed method partitions the cover image into some 3×3 non-overlapping pixel blocks in row major order. k-bits of the secret bit stream are embedded in the center pixel of the block using modified LSB substitution. The difference between the center pixel and 8-neighboring pixels are employed to find out the number of bits that can be embedded in the difference value. The method divides the gray levels [0-255] into five different continuous ranges. The number of bits to be embedded is calculated from the range table. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a higher embedding capacity and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) value of the stego image against the cover image. This work also presents a comparison of the embedding capacity and PSNR value of the proposed method with the existing scheme [5], [7].

A novel steganographic method using 8-neighboring PVD (8nPVD) and LSB substitution

Transmitting data from sender to authorized receiver through a public media (insecure media) with full security is a challenging task. From the ancient time, different methods and techniques have been adopted to gain secure transmission of information. With the development of new technologies, the techniques used for securing information have also changed. The three main technology used for securing digital content are watermarking, steganography and cryptography. Watermarking and steganography can be considered under the same roof, i.e. data hiding techniques. In the last decade, steganography has drawn more attention of researchers. This paper presents a comparative study of steganography algorithms both in the spatial and transform domain.

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A Comparative Study of Steganography Algorithms of Spatial and Transform Domain

Steganography deals with embedding secret data within inoffensive looking objects called “Cover Objects.” To accomplish this, intensive computations are required to be performed. Modern day steganography can be implemented using both software and hardware for the purpose of obscurity based security or Kerckhoffs's principle based Shannon's maxim. The algorithm used in both the implementations may be in spatial or transform domain. Moreover, hardware implementations may be done via a lot of variants among which FPGA (Field Gate Programmable Array) based implementations are most user-friendly and easy to implement and reconfigure. Hardware implementation speeds up the embedding process where as transform domain increases robustness. But the complexity of transform domain is huge compared to the spatial domain. So the simple and fast FPGA-based spatial domain real time hardware implementation of steganography becomes an important field to explore. This paper gives an overview of the hardware platforms and discusses several works done in implementing steganographic algorithms in hardware mainly in the FPGA-based spatial domain.

Manashee Kalita

Papers

An adaptive color image steganography method using adjacent pixel value differencing and LSB substitution technique

A New Steganography Method Using Integer Wavelet Transform and Least Significant Bit Substitution

A novel steganographic method using 8-neighboring PVD (8nPVD) and LSB substitution

A Comparative Study of Steganography Algorithms of Spatial and Transform Domain

A review on hardware implementation of steganography