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

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.

/pdf/digital-image-steganography-and-steganalysis-a-journey-of-3pydlnjt51.pdf

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

/pdf/a-new-method-of-coding-for-steganography-based-on-lsb-19rej2sjr8.pdf

A New Method of Coding for Steganography Based on LSB Matching Revisited

Development and analysis of IWT-SVD and DWT-SVD steganography using fractal cover

Transform-based techniques partially address challenges like robustness and the imperceptibility in image steganography. Such approaches, however, increase the memory requirement and reduce the quality of the cover image and hiding capacity. Moreover, the steganography is always coupled with cryptography to strengthen the confidentiality. This paper presents an adaptive hybrid method for image steganography procedure based on bit reduction and pixel adjustment using the fuzzy logic and integer wavelet transform technique. The fuzzy set theory provides powerful tools to represent and process human knowledge in the form of fuzzy if-then rules that can resolve difficulties in image processing arising due to the uncertainty of the data, tasks, and results. We apply a bit reduction algorithm to each byte of the data which are to hide in the cover image. This decreases the memory usage and increases the capacity. The embedding of the input text into the cover image distorts the cover image. Hence, to minimize the visual difference between the cover image and the text embedded image, an optimum pixel adjustment algorithm is applied to the text embedded image. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Muhammad Noman

Papers

An adaptive hybrid fuzzy-wavelet approach for image steganography using bit reduction and pixel adjustment