An Extensive Survey of Digital Image Steganography: State of the Art

TL;DR

This survey reviews digital image steganography, highlighting its techniques, recent trends, challenges, and the balance between payload capacity and imperceptibility for secure covert communication.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of current steganographic methods, identifying key challenges and recent advancements in the field.

Findings

Digital images are preferred media for steganography due to high redundancy.

Tradeoff exists between payload capacity and imperceptibility in steganography.

Current techniques face limitations in maximizing redundancy without compromising media quality.

Abstract

The need to protect sensitive information privacy duringinformation exchange over the internet/intranet has led towider adoption of cryptography and steganography. The cryptography approaches convert the information into an unreadable format however draws the attention of cryptanalyst owing to the uncommon random nature flow of the bytes when viewing the flowing structured bytes on a computer. While steganography, in contrast, conceals the very existence of covert communication using digital media. Although any digital media (text, image, video, audio) can covey the sensitive information, the media with higher redundant bits are more favorable for embedding the sensitive information without distorting the media. Digital images are majorly used in conveying sensitive information compared to others owing to their higher rate of tolerating distortions, highly available, smaller sizes with high redundant bits. However, the need for maximizing the redundancy bits for the optimum embedding of secret information has been a paramount issue due to the imperceptibility prerequisite which deteriorates with an increase in payload thus, resulting in a tradeoff. This has limited steganography to only applications with lower payload requirements, thus limiting the adoption for wider deployment. This paper critically analyzes the current steganographic techniques, recent trends, and challenges.