Steganographic Techniques of Data Hiding using Digital Images

Steganography is an art that involves communication of secret data in an appropriate carrier, e.g., image, audio, video or TCP/IP header file. Steganography's goal is to hide the very existence of embedded data so as not to arouse an eavesdropper's suspicion. For hiding secret data in digital images, large varieties of steganographic techniques are available, some are more complex than others, and all of them have their respective pros and cons. Steganography has various useful applications and the technique employed depends on the requirements of the application to be designed for. For instance, applications may require absolute invisibility of the secret data, larger secret data to be hidden or high degree of robustness of the carrier. This paper intends to give thorough understanding and evolution of different existing digital image steganography techniques of data hiding in spatial, transform and compression domains. It covers and integrates recent research work without going in to much detail of steganalysis, which is the art and science of defeating steganography.