Data Hiding: Current Trends, Innovation and Potential Challenges

TLDR: Data hiding approaches have received much attention in a number of application areas, however, those approaches unable to solve many issues that necessary to be measured in future investigations.

Abstract: With the widespread growth of digital information and improved internet technologies, the demand for improved information security techniques has significantly increased due to privacy leakage, identity theft, illegal copying, and data distribution. Because of this, data hiding approaches have received much attention in several application areas. However, those approaches are unable to solve many issues that are necessary to measure in future investigations. This survey provides a comprehensive survey on data hiding techniques and their new trends for solving new challenges in real-world applications. The notable applications are telemedicine, 3D objects, mobile devices, cloud/distributed computing and data mining environments, chip and hardware protection, cyber physical systems, internet traffic, fusion of watermarking and encryption, joint compression and watermarking, biometric watermarking, watermarking at the physical layer, and many other perspectives. Further, the potential issues that existing approaches of data hiding face are identified. I believe that this survey will provide a valuable source of information for finding research directions for fledgling researchers and developers.